Revisiting “The Incredible Crash Dummies” TV Special from 1993!

Taking a fond look back at a one-and-done Fox Kids offering that, for its time, had some of the most amazing CGI visuals ever seen on television. No, for real

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COIN-OP Review: Knuckle Bash (1993)

An Elvis impersonator, a football player, a ninja, a guy who kinda’ looks like pro ‘rassler Sting and a random-ass luchador team up to save Chicago from Big Van Vader with a pig’s snout stapled to his face. And yes, it IS as awesome as it sounds.

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VHS Review: 'Dorf Goes Fishing' (1993)

Yep … people actually paid $19.99 for this crap back in the day.

By: Jimbo X

JimboXAmerican@gmail.com

@JimboX

Like all bygone eras, people tend to overly-romanticize the 1990s. Sure, the decade certainly had its finer aspects (Sega, Dunkaroos, actual NHL coverage on ESPN, etc.) but by and large it wasn’t that much different from the modern world we inhabit today.

Yes, mobile technologies have changed the way we work, communicate and navigate the world around us, and people do seem to be considerably fatter than they were 25 years ago, but beyond that? Daily life was practically indistinguishable from life in 2018. You woke up, you had coffee, you watched TV for a little bit, you went to the office, you fielded phone calls, you complained over the printers not working right, you sat in traffic for an ungodly amount of time, you went home, your wife yelled at you for working too long and you usually fell asleep while watching reruns of Good Times, or, if you were feeling a little more cerebral, after reading five pages of the latest Tom Wolfe novel.

You see, our pop cultural uber alles hivemind wants us to remember the 1990s as Jurassic Park and Nirvana and the Super Nintendo, while conveniently glossing over the fact that (ironically) 90 percent of the decade’s commercialized entertainment fodder was downright stupid. For every Pinkerton and Gunstar Heroes, you had about 15 Snow albums, 24 Chester Cheetah video games and, at last approximation, around 87 or 89 TV shows starring Matthew Lawrence … not to mention the deluge of Power Rangers imitators, half-baked Mortal Kombat klones and — dare I say it? — the plethora of releases from Enya, Kenny G and, heaven help us, fuckin' Chant.

Long story short, there was a lot of suck in the 1990s, and you 2000s-era babies who thought it was a golden epoch for all things don’t even KNOW what kind of crap you (luckily) missed out on. You kids want to see what the 1990s was REALLY like? Unplug the Playstation and toss that Crash Bandicoot disc in the garbage, there is NO singular pop cultural product that TRULY demonstrates the core essence of the decade more than this pile of magnetic-tape-powered dookie we’re looking at today called Dorf Goes Fishing.

… I don’t even know how to begin this one. There’s really no way to explain this to anybody who didn’t grow up in the 1990s, so I already feel like I’m having to teach you Chinese arithmetic in Roman numerals. Still, it’s my job as a writer to at least try, and well, here goes nothin’.

Tim Conway is this comedian guy that had a shtick where he got on his knees, socked shoes over his patellas and pretended to be a midget. Sometimes they’d stick his legs in holes so he could lean forward and backward all crazily-like, but for the most part? That was his entire gimmick. And yeah, I know he was on The Carol Burnett Show, but do I look like somebody who would even remotely care about such nonsense?

Anyway, Conway’s character Dorf somehow managed to star in his own series of straight-to-video specials, and trust me, advertisements for those things were nigh inescapable in the mid-1990s. It seemed like commercials for Dorf Goes Fishing aired every hour or so on The Weather Channel, and I recall one Christmas in which no less than three members of my family received copies of the video as gifts. Come to think of it, I seem to recall my grandpa having a VHS copy, although I’m not entirely sure he ever removed the factory plastic. Regardless, we never screened it at his humble abode — even when the cable went off.

And after rewatching this relic for the first time in at least 25 years, I understand why — a static, grey scrambled screen actually is preferable to the product itself in this case. But hey, don’t take my word for it — how about we relive the wonder and the splendor together, readers?

The video begins with Tim Conway extolling the therapeutic benefits of fishing — and of course, his fishing line keeps fucking up on him, because THAT IS COMEDY.

...but when I whack my wife over the head with a cooler, all of a sudden it becomes "domestic abuse" instead of slapstick.

By the way, is Tim Conway alive or dead? Eh, I'm too lazy to Google it. We join Dorf as he reminisces on the first time he went fishing next to a sandy cove. And yep, he's falling back and forth and side to side because, good golly, is that ever hilarious.

Next, we cut to a skit about how a caveman (also played by Conway) discovered fishing. By the way, the segment is narrated by Conway, who is using a crappy Italian accent, for no discernible reason whatsoever. Man, this production values are WAY lower than I remembered. As in, the actual stock of the video is just barely above cable access quality. Also — with that bush mustache and parted hairdo, Conway does indeed look a lot like Hitler. 

Anyway, "Grunt the Caveman" tries to use all sorts of inventions to fish, including a bow and arrow and a big stick with a rock tied to it like a baseball bat. Then he gets slung into the wild blue yonder by a computer-generated palm tree. Yep, this is CONSIDERABLY lamer than I remembered, and I honestly didn't think that was possible.

Now Dorf is giving us a primer on what wardrobe to wear for a fishing trip, complete with some of the worst greenscreen effects you've seen ... well, probably ever. Oh boy, just wait until he tries to put the fanny pack on ... it's a goddamn laugh riot. Oh, and I hope you like jokes about Dorf accidentally punching himself in the lips while zipping up his jacket ... because they use that gag TWICE.

Man, I'm starting to get motion sickness from this camerawork, and I'm not even joshing you. Well, anyway, after that segment drags on for about four minutes (no, for real), we hop back to Dorf (again rocking that awful Italian accent) and he's brought his big, fat annoying ballbusting, complaining bitch of a wife fishing with him because she wants to take pictures of their afternoon out and they bicker and complain to each other for awhile and then she conks him over the head with a cooler. Apparently, Conway and pals were just pleased as punch with that one — hence, its prominent placement in the TV commercials for the video.

An interesting aside; while the commercials for this tape featured a laugh track, the actual video cassette itself doesn't. But we DO get a lot of cartoon-quality sound effects, though, if that makes up for it.

So Dorf's wife fishes with bacon while he fishes with some high tech expensive lure. Now his accent has transitioned into a bad Mike Ditka impersonation. Then he yanks bubble gum out of his wife's mouth in a sped-up sequence, because that CLEARLY makes the act of quasi-spouse abuse all the more hilarious. Oh goddamn, we're not even halfway through this fucking thing. The wife busts Dorf's balls some more for leaving the coffee maker on and not feeding their pet bird before they left. Then we segue to a "Discount in Price $hopping Network" skit, which is a pastiche of QVC and HSN and all that shit. I have no idea why the models are wearing George Washington wigs, so don't even ask.

Another computer generated fish eats one of Dorf's weighing scales and an electric filleting knife pokes Dorf's tires out. Now it's time for a parody of an exercise video and ... goddamn, this is bad. It's basically just Dorf raising his hands up and down over and over again while his hairpiece flutters in the wind. We got some more sped-up scenes of Dorf almost getting killed using shoddy fishing equipment, complete with — you guessed it! — more primitive CGI effects. Oh, and at one point, Dorf uses a cartoon radar system to run over people in a pontoon boat and crash into some campers, all the while referring to random people as "krautheads."

We cut back to Dorf and his wife fishin' and complaining to each other. You see, the joke is Dorf can't catch shit with his high tech rod and reel, while his wife can catch a whole bunch of shit using a crappy pole. Man, that is FUNNY.

Now it's time to watch Dorf IN DRAG for a terrible Julia Childs impersonation as we take a look at a fishing cooking show parody. Jesus, this thing cannot end soon enough.

Yep ... the thing goes on for EIGHT MINUTES. This is so bad I can't even make fun of it — it's just painful. This isn't comedy, this is the opposite of comedy.

And our video concludes with Dorf fishing under the moonlight, STILL trying to catch a single fish while his wife bitches at him offscreen. Cue end credits, and mercifully, this one is, thankfully, all over.

Not gonna' lie ... I do kinda want that keychain, for totally inexplicable reasons.

Yeah, that was about as much fun as getting a rectal biopsy, wasn’t it? Needless to say, there’s pretty much no reason for anyone to ever experience this … unless, of course, the intent is to showcase just how misguided en vogue ‘90s nostalgia actually is, sometimes.

According to Wikipedia, Dorf Goes Fishing is just one of EIGHT straight-to-video Dorf specials. Yep, eight, including no less than two that revolve around golfing. There are also Dorf special about auto racing, baseball and the Olympics, if you’re so inclined, and if you are … well, here’s a relevant article you might want to take to heart. VERY much to heart, actually.

This is the kind of stuff that makes me abhor myself for having an “obscure media” obsession. There’s nothing funny, creative, or generally noteworthy about the video, and I genuinely feel miffed about having spent 40 minutes of my life screening it when I could’ve been doing something more productive with my existence. Not even getting the opportunity to eviscerate it in this post after the fact really justifies the upfront investment in this one. I hardly regret doing anything, but by golly, I honestly regret rewatching this rubbish.
Trust me — you’d have more fun watching that floating Dorf keychain sit still on a kitchen table than you will watching this video. And that, my friends, is the undisputed truth.

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PROPAGANDA REVIEW: MTV's 'Hate Rock' Special from 1993!

Yes, even back then MTV was trying to warn the masses about the scourge of white supremacy ... and in the clumsiest way possible, to boot.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

Anybody who thinks MTV is just now rallying the SJW troops for a culture war against whatever the higher-ups at Viacom deem a "far right threat" really haven't been paying attention. The reality is that MTV has been bangin' the social justice battle gong for more than a quarter century, and nothing demonstrates that as well as the 1993 "special report" Hate Rock from 1993.

Yes, a full 25 years ago - LONG before Charlottesville and Andrew Anglin and Black Lives Matter and President Trump and Pepe the Frog - MTV was hellbent on convincing the same masses who unironically liked bands like Green Jelly and Ugly Kid Joe that, within their own communities, there was an insidious, underground menace a bubblin' that - if left unchecked and unconquered - would inevitably result in the Day of the Rope coming to fruition and scores of Jews and blacks and Hispanics and gays and Indians getting massacred by the Fourth Reich. And, as we are all keenly aware, such wouldn't start with the slow degradation of civil liberties in the name of amorphous multiculturalism, nor government policies that nonconsensually hoist globalization on the front lawns of largely homogeneous cultures economically and socially incapable of assuring its peaceful assimilation into the local fabric. Nope, it begins, naturally, with a bunch of shitty guitar players with bald heads screaming "nigger" into a microphone in front of crowds of literally dozens of rancorous racist fans, and it's up to MTV - the great cultural taste-maker it is - to enlighten and indoctrinate us all into stamping this stuff out BEFORE it gets too big (read: economically sustainable) and the Holocaust 2.0 happens.

You know, some readers have asked me what my favorite kind of propaganda is, and it HAS to be stuff like this - hardcore, ideologically-biased, fact-and-reason-resistant agitprop built solely to discredit and disgrace a competing flavor of hardcore, ideologically-biased, fact-and-reason-resistant agitprop. This thing isn't even really meant to be entertaining, as much as it is 30-minute secular worship service, kinda' like the politically correct version of the world's least articulate Sunday school teacher mumbling his way through the story of Lucifer's fall.

But really, we ought to let MTV speak for themselves, shouldn't we? Let's push this sumbitch in the old VCR player and take a trip down memory lane, why don't we?

Kurt Loder lets us know the following is a "Free Your Mind" special report, which, of course, is marketing-speak for "let us tell you how you ought to feel about things for the next 30 minutes." From there, we throw it to a concert in Canada, where the creatively-named band Aryan is singing some song about Jews or race-mixing or what the hell ever. Then there's a quick, totally context-less clip where a dude with a Nazi eagle tattoo on his forehead talks about shooting somebody and here comes Kurt Loder - apparently, strolling past though the set of the first Candyman movie - ambling into the frame and to say something to the effect of "boy howdy, I bet you sure have noticed the sudden surge in 'race-baiting skinheads' wreaking havoc in the underground 'oi' scene, and goddamn, isn't it terrible, folks?" That's our cue for some black and white footage of people getting hit with baseball bats transposed over Hitler speeches as we cut to stock footage of skinheads and Confederate flag-waving marchers looking all vicious and whatnot while Aerosmith's "Livin' on the Edge" loops around it.

Loder says the fall of communism IMMEDIATELY sparked a resurgence of far-right politics in Europe, which in turn began influencing racist dissidents in the U.S. We then get to briefly meet two skinheads named Sean and Mike - obviously meant to draw parallels to Beavis and Butt-Head - and Loder describes them as "beer-swilling thugs" before throwing it to archival footage of this Mexican guy talking about this time he got roughed up by some Skrewdriver fans, with the onscreen caption sure to note he was attacked by "racist skinheads," as opposed to the TOLERANT skinheads dotting our fine chemotherapy centers from coast-to-shining-coast. And that's the perfect excuse to take a look at the world of NON-RACIST skinheads, which does indeed exist ... in Canada. Well, WHERE else would you expect to find that kind of shit? Loder then explains how "real" skinheads love black people and their music, especially ska and "the working class sounds" of non-Hitler-inspired "oi."

Time to sample some of that insidious white power music, why dont' we? Here's a few lines of prose from some band called No Remorse - "Nigger, face to face don't try and mess with the master race." Well, that's still less uses of the word "nigger" than in the aggregate Kendrick Lamar song, so what's the rub, MTV? Kurt then goes on to say that the National Front basically INVENTED racist music by co-opting the oi scene in England back in the late 1970s. Then we meet a chap named Warren Miekle, lead singer of the New Jersey-based outfit Aggravated Assault, who says his music has a "political message." And because the aggregate MTV viewer in 1993 STILL needed helps filling in the gaps, this is immediately followed by another Hitler speech quip where Die Fuhrer is talking about white superiority or some such mess. Then a bespectacled Nazi nerd named Todd shows a banner  reading "Adolf Hitler Was Right" while another 'un shows off a tatoo of a Jew hanging from a tree, to represent what he believes DIDN'T happen during the Holocaust. Which, in one of the most surreal things I've ever seen in my life, devolves into Loder talking about the "Final Solution" over stock footage of Auschwitz skeletons while fucking George Michaels plays in the background." Then this Holocaust survivor is wheeled out so he can say it's not like 1933 in Germany no more, because THIS time they have a chance to defend themselves against the intolerant.

I don't know about you, but I think naming your group "Unidentified German Oi Band" is just painfully pretentious.

We return from commercial break and Kurt Loder is walking around Berlin while "Winds of Change" by The Scorpions play because fuck it, subtlety is for pussies. There's this great transition shot where footage of people being all happy during the fall of the Berlin Wall is interrupted by scenes of skinheads throwing Molotov cocktails into buildings. Loder then talks about "economic paranoia" and "anti-immigrant sentiment" fueling far right ideologies in post-reunification Germany, which culminates with a clip of skinheads singing a song about giving Elie Wiesel cups of tea laced with Zyklon B. This ultimately leads to Loder stating that kids are turning to white power music because they feel as if their governments are sacrificing THEIR economic futures in favor of their own liberal social policies ... which, yeah, certainly couldn't explain why kids TODAY are into all of that "alt-right" Pepe the Frog stuff or anything like that. The narrator then explains how 1.5 million migrants from war-torn, former Soviet-controlled states have flooded into Germany since 1988, and that's making neo-Nazi skinheads ANGRY as all get-out. To demonstrate this, we get this one unintentionally hilarious scene where an Indian guy points to graffiti showing a swastika and carefully explains that it probably means "hey, these guys might be Nazis, be careful fucking with them." Then we get footage of a 1992 "anti-fascist" concert headlined by The Scorpions before another commercial break whisks us away.

Now we turn our attention to North American skinhead music, and it doesn't take Kurt long to start decrying outfits like "The Church of the Creator" and the "Hammerskins" as vile, reprehensible pieces of dookie who "hate all people different from themselves," all while praising "non-racist" skinhead groups like the Sharps, who - irony of ironies - hate everybody who thinks differently from themselves. That segues into the lead singer of RAHOWA talking about how important the Internet is to building the skinhead music fanbase, which leads to a scene in which a hacker acting on MTV's behalf infiltrates a BBS board that offers homemade explosives recipes and asks its users to send in the addresses of "queers" for some kind of database. This leads Loder to ask what is it about this kind of music that goads Americans into believing such incredibly "anti-American ideals?" One detective says it's probably because the kids are getting abused and neglected at home and they're probably longing for any kind of camaraderie that doesn't include their parents yelling at 'em or the cool kids at school referring to 'em as "weirdo faggots." 

Apparently, 1993's neo-Nazis looked like 2016's Bernie Sanders supporters.

Time to hear from the lead singer of RAHOWA again (who, of course, has renounced his Nazi ways over the last few decades, in case you forgot it.) He says some inconsequential shit, and now it's time for Kurt Loder to hit the mean streets of Orlando, wearing a gaudy red floral shirt and sunglasses as part of some "undercover" assignment.

Oh shit, he's there to interview the imperial wizard of the KKK, who is apparently a 16-year-old kid with four or five developmental disorders named Archie Johnston. Meanwhile, this dude in a Beastie Boys shirt makes fun of him for being into Hitler. He shows Kurt a noose in his bedroom and says the Klan is about "Christian Identity" and they argue about what the biblical definition of "neighbor" is. Anyway, they try their damnedest to make Archie look mentally retarded, which, yeah, he probably is. Then they show him talking on the phone trying to get a bunch of guys together to go scare some homosexuals while "Take The Skinheads Bowling" plays in the background. Loder than asks whether or not Archie and his ilk ought to be censored which - after citing the First Amendment - he begrudgingly says no. But that doesn't mean he doesn't think they shouldn't be under a constant state of surveillance, which Loder never addresses as a violation of the FIFTH Amendment, but what the hell ever. 

By the way, that Archie kid was later arrested for assaulting an interracial couple. And the special ends with him getting taken into custody while "The KKK Took My Baby Away" by The Ramones plays. Yeah - I can't imagine TODAY'S MTV being so tongue-in-cheek when it comes to TODAY'S skinheads, for sure.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Gomer Pyle, S.S.

You know, this kind of stuff is getting harder and harder to get a hold of. In fact, the only way I could even screen this special was a secondhand copy of a copy taken from fucking Veoh, so it's probably safe to assume that within another five or ten years or so, this thing's gonna' be all but erased from the Web. And since YouTube and Dailymotion are getting so insanely Nazi-esque about both copyright protected material and "offensive" content (even if it's framed in a way to make fun of and demean people with radical viewpoints) getting posted on their respective platforms, unless somebody is ripping this shit to the Internet Archive en mass we could be on the verge of a multimedia purge the likes of which haven't been seen since the great MGM vault fire of 1967.

The whole thing, from start to finish, is barely 22 minutes long and once you've caught it once there's not really anything noteworthy enough to inspire you to rewind the cassette. It definitely has a weird late '80s, early '90s vibe going on, meaning it doesn't really feel like it belongs in either decade, but still has enough aesthetic imprints from both to kinda feel familiar.

While MTV today hosts entire awards show anchored around white guilt, I suppose it's safe to say they weren't nearly as deft with their counter-propaganda back in '93. It's obvious that Viacom was trying to posit the emerging neo-Nazi skinhead music culture as a major cultural concern, but at the same time it's presented in such a hokey package that it's hard to take the program seriously. That's evident from the goofy Beavis and Butt-Head onscreen font and the downright bizarre musical interludes (I'm STILL not over the whole Auschwitz-set-to-George Michael music video), not to mention the depiction of Archie Johnston as a dude literally too retarded to answer basic questions about the U.S. Constitution, let alone usher in an ethnic purge of millions of people.

Eventually, Viacom would get significantly better at using the Music Television format to push sociopolitical agendas, but Hate Rock is certainly evidence that the powers-that-are at MTV have been trying to use their platform to engineer culture for decades. As an anti-white supremacist spiel, it's pretty weak and flaccid, and as a random abstraction of its time, it's not all that entertaining nor enlightening. Indeed, I think we'd all rather have watched the commercials that originally ran on the program than the program itself - and if that isn't a testament to the fact we've become a truly post-racial society (if not a colorless, mass-marketer-tested, consumerism-uber-alles Valhalla) I don't know what is.

ADDENDUM!

A while back I actually got an email from a guy who said he knew Todd and the circle he hung out with back in the day. I asked the reader if I could publish his email comments in full, which he agreed to under the condition I keep his identity secret. Anyhoo, here's what he had to say — by the way, I'm publishing it unedited, just because. 

I knew Todd (last name Keller), in fact I still have some junky old tattoos from the kid. (he was) Dumb as a rock,  I moved away from Orlando just a few months before this MTV episode was filmed. 

I'm NOT a racist, but sadly I was. I grew up and avoided the criminal life that killed or jailed everyone I knew from that time. I'm writing to give you some insight to what happened then and there in Oviedo.  

There is no justification for this ignorant bullshit but Todd wasn't  raised by some redneck - his mother was normal and frequently admonished Todd for his racism. He wasn't poor. He didn't do drugs. He believed most of what he aspoused to believe mostly because of the school system in Oviedo.  

Jackson Heights middle school and oviedo high were racial hotbed in the mid 90s. Both schools had a majority of African American students, these children were also having very hard lives. Crack was king and given the rural history of the town many of them where grandchildren or great grandchildren of real slaves. There were murders, race riots (in school), and if you were white you sometimes bore the brunt of issues. I saw two murders one in 6th grade and one in 9th. 

Time and travel continue to impress on me how strange of a world I live in. No one had hope, everyone hated everyone. In all honesty we (black and white) should have probably fought for a better school, teachers that cared, and our future. 

And really, there's only one thing I can say in riposte to that. And that thing, of course, is ...

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B-MOVIE REVIEW: "Carnosaur" (1993)

It’s that other dinosaur movie from 1993 … and yeah, it ain’t exactly on par with its Spielbergian competition.

When the name “Roger Corman” pops up, most people tend to think exclusively of his films from the late 1950s and early 1960s -- specifically, his no-budget exploitation mini-classics “A Bucket of Blood,” “The Little Shop of Horrors” and “The Wasp Woman.” While Corman hung up his directorial gloves shortly thereafter, he went on to have a career spanning decades as a low-budget genre film producer, churning out some absolute masterpieces in the 1970s -- “Rock N Roll High School,” “Death Race 2000” and “Piranha,” among them -- along with some real turds in the 1980s (if you never saw “Munchies” or “Lords of the Deep,” consider yourself very fortunate.)

Even in the 1990s -- long-past the heyday of the drive-in theater -- Corman had his hand in producing quite a number of straight-to-video and extremely-limited run sci-fi, horror and exploitation films. Hell, he even hopped back in the director’s seat for 1990’s “Frankenstein Unbound,” which is really only noteworthy because it had that dude from INXS in it and there’s a part where a character fiddles around with an in-car application that looks astonishingly similar to Wikipedia.

Which brings us to the curious case of 1993’s Corman-produced “Carnosaur.” Obviously, the film was meant to cash-in on the success of that summer’s uber-blockbuster “Jurassic Park,” but beyond the fact that both films feature dinosaurs, there’s really not many similarities between the two. While “Jurassic Park” is a hyper-big-budget, family-friendly popcorn flick designed to arouse that typical Spielbergian awe and anxiety, “Carnosaur” is a super-cheap, blood-soaked straight-up horror flick that really owes more to “Friday the 13th” than it does the work of Michael Crichton. And believe it or not, the source material for “Carnosaur” -- a biopunk novel of the same name penned by British scribe Harry Adam Knight -- actually predates the source material for  Spielberg's “Jurassic Park” by six years.

One of these men is the primary protagonist of the film. Take a wild guess which one.

Granted, “Carnosaur” -- made on a $1 million budget and filmed over the course of just two and a half weeks -- isn’t exactly fine art by any stretch of the imagination, but it does have some fairly interesting ideas and even a few entertaining sequences that you wouldn’t have seen in “JP” in a million, billion years (like a scene in which a velicoraptor thrashes a Jeep filled with hippies to death.) Plus, this movie has Clint Howard in it, which is automatically five hundred times cooler than having Jeff Goldblum in a lead acting role.

The film begins with black and white scenes from a chicken processing plant. As the opening credits roll, we see genetic code sequences flash on the screen for a litany of animals, including turkeys and iguanas. From there, we jump to Diane Ladd in a lab, watching closed circuit television. She watches two handlers find an “egg” ripped right out of H.R. Giger’s sketchbook, which predictably concludes with one of them getting their faces slashed by something we don’t get a very good look at.

After that, we watch a truck driver for “Purex Poultry” stop his ride to check up on some “cluckers.” He pays for his concerns by having his throat chewed off by a chicken-dinosaur monster we see for literally one second. From there, we meet the protagonist of the film, a drunk, shotgun toting mobile home owner named “Doc Smith,” who is introduced to us by threatening to blow the heads off some hippies hanging out over by his backhoe. One of the loiterers is a blonde runaway named Thrush; ever the noble humanist alcoholic, Smith allows her to run free instead of Trayvoning her.

...and this, I am afraid, is probably one of the better shots of the dinosaur in the film. 

The next day, the police find the body of the truck driver. As would anyone, they just assume a bobcat did it and go about their merry business. From there, it’s subplot city, as we meet the town coroner (he is plum perplexed by those mysterious, dinosaur-looking claw marks on all the dead folks being wheeled into the office) and the daughter of a biotech employee who is sneaking out of her house to party hard with some mullet heads. Meanwhile, Smith and the po-po visit the local hippie commune; although Thrush is right there in plain sight, he refuses to identify her as the nefarious trespasser from the night before. They then talk for a bit about Nevada residing in the “Dinosaur Highway,” which is not at all heavy-handed.

So, the daughter from earlier -- remember her? Well, don’t get too attached, since she and her amigos get torn asunder by a raptor in the next sequence. Bonus points a plenty for a lingering shot of fresh blood dripping off a “Peace on Earth” bumper sticker, as well.

Smith and Thursh then encounter a half-dead Mexican, who apparently got attacked by a dinosaur offscreen. Conveniently enough, he dies before he can give us any profound exposition; two security guards become dinosaur chew toys immediately after.

I guess now is a good time to mention it: this movie is extremely dark. Now, when I say dark, I don’t mean somber or depressing, I mean it’s literally hard to fucking see anything because the lighting is so poor. Since this is a Roger Corman production, I suppose lackluster cinematography is to be expected, but the lighting is so bad throughout the film that it simply had to be a conscious choice by the filmmakers -- not so much for atmosphere, I believe, as it was a meager attempt to mask just how shitty looking the dinosaur effects actually are.

Yep. Doesn't feel like an obvious green screen job at all!

After a senator pukes up a blueberry pie coated in goat embryos, the father of the girl who got killed by a dinosaur earlier DEMANDS to meet with Diane Ladd’s evil scientist character, and she tricks him into entering a subterranean chamber filled with, uh, disco lights. And also death-lasers. And a dinosaur. Needless to say … he doesn’t have much screen time after this scene.

Next up, Clint Howard walks into a diner and grosses out an expecting couple. Then, the dinosaur attacks a whole bunch of hippies, complete with a couple of gnarly dismemberment shots. Strangely enough, there is a scene where a set of severed hands are “discovered” by one of the protagonists, which is an almost exact copy of the scene in “Jurassic Park” where what’s her name finds the pieces of Samuel L. Jackson.

At this point, Smith has had enough, god damn it, so he decides to sneak into Diane Ladd’s super-security compound and forces her to tell him what the hell she’s up to at gunpoint. To make a long story short, she’s created a synthetic dinosaur out of various bird and reptile genes, and her plan is to eradicate humanity by infecting every single woman on the planet with dino babies, which presumably will run wild and eat all of the remaining men afterward.

So, uh, what is this supposed to symbolize, exactly?

Next scene, a cop finds a baby dinosaur in a carton of store-bought eggs and Clint has his head bitten off while eating a bucket of KFC. While a bunch of pregnant women moan and wail inside a local physician’s waiting room, Diane Ladd shows Smith a woman who gives on-screen birth to a dinosaur baby, and even though it kills her, he still makes jokes about it, including the most-groan-inducing-line of the entire movie: “that would make a great theme park.”

From there, FEMA decides to quarantine the entire desert town, while Ladd and Smith have a really melodramatic, pseudo-philosophical discussion about God and man’s impact on nature. Thankfully, we’re treated to a great sequence immediately afterward, where the cop from earlier challenges the dinosaur to a gunfight after it eats an entire pet store. Yeah, it may be a Pyrrhic victory for the cop, who has his stomach sliced open, but at least he goes out in the most glorious way possible: blowing the motherfucking head off of a dinosaur with a shotgun.

Of course, since we now have all of those dino eggs on the market and half the women in Nevada are shitting out reptile fetuses, we don’t have to worry about just one cold-blooded threat anymore. Strangely enough, the dinosaurs seem to be hyper-evolutionary beings, with the creatures progressing from raptor-sized to T-Rex-sized in just a few hours. After Ladd exits the film via an homage/rip-off of the chestburster sequence from “Alien,” Smith rushes home to his trailer, so he can give Thrush the antidote for dinosaur baby madness. After that, FEMA officials in containment suits shoot up the office of pregnant women and Doc decides to battle a T-Rex to the death while commandeering a Bobcat. And just when you think this thing is going to close on a happy note, here come the federal crisis response units, who promptly shoot both Smith and Thrush dead with machine guns before flamethrower-ing their corpses. And the final shot of the entire film? A flaming portrait of Alfred E. Neuman, of “Mad Magazine” fame … for some reason.

Not that you really need me to tell you this, but as an overall film, “Carnosaur” is more of a failure than a success. While the dim and dreary ambiance is a nice foil to the almost exuberant glowiness of “Jurassic Park,” the film itself is just too visually drab and opaque. Much like the first “Alien vs. Predator” film, you really have to struggle to see what’s going on half the time, and what few glances of the special effects you see are pretty underwhelming. The dinosaurs -- from what I determined -- are a mish-mash of stop-motion animation and puppets, and they all look pretty crappy, especially when moving. Seriously, the dinosaur from the 6000 SUX commercial in the original “Robocop” looked better than any of the prehistoric beasts on display in this film.

Of course, it’s pretty dumb to compare the effects of “Carnosaur” to “Jurassic Park,” since there is such a wide discrepancy in their budgets. While I liked the grimmer take Corman and pals went with (you have to love the concluding nod to “Night of the Living Dead”) the movie never really embraced its exploitation roots. I mean, yeah, the film does have a fair amount of gore, but since it IS a low-budget exploitation flick, why didn’t they just go all out and make it a hyper-gory, shoestring adaptation of the old “Dinosaurs Attack!” trading cards? That would have made for a far more interesting film than what they ultimately ended up producing, and methinks it would have shifted far more video rental units as well.

As for the cast, there isn’t much to discuss here. The film was helmed by Adam Simon, who is probably best known for stuff like “Brain Dead” and “Body Chemistry 2.” Doc Smith was portrayed by Raphael Sbarge (Jiminy Cricket on “Once Upon a Time) and Thrush was played by Jennifer Runyon -- whose big claim to fame was playing Gwendolyn on “Charles in Charge.” I suppose the biggest question about the entire film is how Diane Ladd wound up starring in it -- I am guessing she either owed somebody working on the movie  big time or she really, really needed to pay off some mad back taxes for the ‘92 fiscal year.

Alas, the movie wound up nearly doubling its budget at the box office, leading to two more sequels throughout the 1990s, with recycled scenes from the trilogy making their way into two more films, 2001’s “Raptor” and 2006’s “The Eden Formula.” While the official series has laid dormant for almost two decades, you have to wonder if the franchise is due for a rebirth on the heels of “Jurassic World” -- I for one, would be way more excited about the prospects of “Carnosaur Planet” than any 30-year-old man ever should be.

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A Tribute to G.G. Allin

On the 20th Anniversary of His Untimely Death, We Reflect Upon The Life and Times of the Greatest Punk Rocker of All-Time

Twenty years ago today, Kevin Michael “G.G.” Allin loaded a fatal dose of heroin into his veins, and plopped over dead, leaving behind nothing but a bloated, discolored corpse and a good decade and a half of the greatest, most decadent, hyper-offensive puke-ola rock and roller music ever recorded. Everything you could say bad about society, you could find inside the liquor-enthused corpuscles of Allin -- a borderline psychotic, ultra-nihilistic punk rock singer whose music championed careless drug use, even more careless sexual adventuring and promoted murder of authority figures of all varieties -- politicians, policemen, teachers, parents, whoever. His stage shows became legendary for their crude excesses; not content with just singing about debauchery and bodily fluids, his concerts routinely culminated with his ejaculating of various viscous fluids -- urine, feces, snot, no-doubt-STD-tainted blood, etc. -- all over the audience. Most so-called rock and roll shows end with an encore, and the well-groomed singer thanking the crowd for their courtesy. G.G. shows, conversely, usually ended with either him getting beaten to  a bloody pulp by paying concert-goers or a mini-riot breaking out that almost always resulted in him being arrested for some form of public lewdness. Did I mention that he frequently performed while completely nude? Well, he did.

Some have considered G.G.’s music to be among the worst ever recorded. Some have said that his stage presence -- with all of that bleeding, and vomiting and urinating -- was just to cover-up the fact that he and his band mates had minimal musical ability. They’re probably right, but at the same time, those detractors are also very, very wrong: what made G.G. special -- a figure who is still revered in many circles today -- was that complete and utter lack of giving a shit. His music may have been technically awful, but at the same time, it’s some of the most brilliant, unfettered, and -- dare I say it -- beautiful mayhem ever pressed to vinyl. G.G. Allin was the sort of madman-cum-poet genius that Iggy Pop wished he could’ve been. Not only was G.G. easily the greatest punk rocker in history, in hindsight? He’s probably the only punk rocker in the annals (and anus) of recorded music.

G.G.’s story is the kind of reverse-Americana tale that makes your heart swell with patriotic splendor. Born in the relative tranquility of the New England woodlands, G.G.’s father -- a hyper violent Christian fundamentalist -- told mama G.G. that her hitherto unborn son was actually the second coming of Yeshua, hence why G.G.’s actual birth name was “Jesus Christ Allin.” Eventually, momma Allin took G.G. and his brother Merle (who would serve as G.G.’s bassist in several bands) away from dear old dad (whose quirky activities including digging graves in the backyard and pointing menacingly at his wife and children), and enrolled him in special ed courses. To make life easier for her young-un, she decided to rename him “Kevin Michael” -- the G.G. namesake, if you were wondering, stemming from Merle’s inability to pronounce “Jesus” correctly as a wee one.

If you’ve ever seen “Hated” -- the absolutely astounding 1993 documentary helmed by, of all people, the dude that would go on to direct all of those “Hangover” movies -- you know how G.G.’s high school years played out. Routinely dressing in drag, G.G. fronted numerous rock and roll outfits, all of which sucked, and majestically. After school, he went out into the magnificent urban hellhole of late 1970s New York City, recording his first album “Always Was, Is and Always Shall Be” in 1980.

While song titles like “Pussy Summit Meeting,” “Beat, Beat, Beat” and “Assface” may sound juvenile and inauthentic, there’s no denying the no-frills, low-low-budget greatness of tracks like “1980s Rock and Roll” -- a Johnny Thunders meets “End of the Century”-era Ramones ass-stomper that’s one part the most flamboyantly homosexual thing you’ve ever heard and one part what you’d expect a hate crime murder by neo-Nazis to sound like. Very, very few artists -- in any medium -- have been able to meld extremes the way G.G. did. Even this early in his career, you can see his skill in mashing the antithetical into dialectical excellence: music that’s both fragile and murderously violent, music that’s ridiculously homophobic while bi-curiously artsy-fartsy and music that’s, at the same damn time, pop-radio catchy and sinisterly anti-social.

Throughout the 1980s, G.G. went on the musical equivalent of a jihadist rampage, recording such counterculture favorites as “Eat My Diarrhea,” “Hard Candy Cock,” “Kill the Children and Save the Food,” and of course, the punk anthem  to rape, murder, dismember and repeatedly violate, post-mortem, all punk anthems, “Bite It You Scum,” alongside bands with cheery monikers like “The Texas Nazis,” “The Cedar Street Sluts” and “The AIDS Brigade.”

In 1987, GG recorded what many consider to be his magnum opus, “Freaks, Faggots Drunks and Junkies.” The zero-budget, minimalist underground masterpiece featured some of Allin’s greatest poetic works, including “Outlaw Scumfuc,” “Die When You Die,” “Commit Suicide,” and “Dope Money.” It was around this point that Allin took his violent-to-the-nth-degree stage performances to the max, with virtually every show ending with him being jailed for assault and/or battery. Or public indecency. Or inciting a riot. Or vandalism. Or arson. In his free time, G.G. started recording country music singles -- including the brilliant “When I Die” -- and visiting serial killers like John Wayne Gacy. Hey, if Matthew Sweet can spend his off-hours making cat pottery, why can’t G.G. spend his weekends hobnobbing with convicted murderers and rapists?

Things took a nosedive for G.G. in 1989, when he was convicted of setting a groupie on fire and then cutting her to drink her blood in some sort of vampiric HIV ritual or something. Although G.G. professed his innocence -- kinda’ -- he still ended up serving time in the pokey, not being released (unleashed?) on society again until 1991.

With his new band “The Murder Junkies,” a freshly paroled G.G. came roaring back on the music scene, even garnering tons of daytime television publicity on “concerned citizenry” bullstuff like “Geraldo” and “The Jerry Springer Show” (back before “The Jerry Springer Show” was synonymous with exploitative sleaze, of course.) His comeback album “Brutality and Bloodshed for All,” was arguably the most absurdly violent compact disc of the early half of the decade, featuring all-time sing-along favorites such as “Legalize Murder,” “Terror in America” and of course, that Christmas standard “Shoot, Knife, Strangle, Beat and Crucify.”

Unfortunately, G.G.’s time on this earth was short, and on June 28, 1993 -- after a concert deteriorated into bedlam after just two and a half songs -- he decided to do some drinking and heroin shooting, which I guess is a bad combination, since it kinda’ killed him. He was subsequently buried in his tightie-whities, and in accordance to his lyrical wishes, put six feet under with a bottle of Jim Beam clasped to his hand. For years to come, fans the world over would trek to his burial grounds, where, in keeping with his true-blue punk roots, admirers and mourners would pay their final respects to the musical icon by dropping trou and literally shitting and peeing on his headstone.

“Had G.G. not died that night” has become one of the great “what-if” scenarios of music history. With all of that free daytime publicity, it seemed like G.G. was really not that far off from obtaining widespread, mainstream acknowledgement. Of course, he also said that later that year, he was going to kill himself on stage, so, yeah, it’s anybody’s guess as to what could’ve been here.

It’s easy to look back on G.G.’s life as a tragedy of excesses -- an excess of drugs, an excess of un-P.C. hatred, and excess of excrement, for sure. But if you ask me, the real tragedy of G.G.’s career is that so few people -- even some of his most die-hard fans -- have been able to look past the stage show shenanigans and celebrate Allin for his musicianship. In a musical landscape that would soon be telling us that Green Day, The Offspring and A.F.I. were punk music, G.G.’s one-take, one-minute, recorded for one-dollar songs about hate, animalistic sex and extravagant violence stood out as a sharp, sharp contrast to the ever-increasing pussification of what was once the most dangerous counter-culture construct in all of entertainment. The death of G.G. Allin really was the death of punk rock music itself, serving as that final bookend to an illustrious, phlegm and blood-stained movement. Before G.G.’s death, we had Reagan Youth, The Mentors and The Dead Boys. After, we got Bad Religion, NOFX and god help us, Anti-Flag -- pseudo-sensitive, pseudo-intellectual wannabe-protestor music that has more in common -- aurally and philosophically -- with Wilson Phillips than Sid Vicious.

While rock and roll music has become a castrated, all-inclusive culture of self-celebration and corporate profiteering, G.G. Allin remains a testament to what punk, and in many ways, rock and roll music as a whole, used to be. Long gone are the hyper-virile, hyper-aggressive anti-ballads -- too misogynistic and too homophobic, some moral guardians will tell you, when the fact of the matter is, music of the like is just too damn unfiltered as an artistic vision. The same people that thirty years ago were defending to the death the stupid, absurdly macho music of W.A.S.P. and Motley Crue now decry such entertainment as offensively masculine and culturally insensitive -- instead of being chastised for puking and peeing on stage by the PMRC, G.G.’s greatest opponent today would be the sickeningly equalitarian MTV and Rolling Stone mass culture complex. Instead of being chased out of town by middle-aged parents and pot-bellied local police, G.G. would be forced into exile by 20-something hipster inclusionists, who would consider his music too “racist, homophobic and anti-woman” to be allowed to be heard by anyone, anywhere.

At the end of the day, does the hate-filled vileness of G.G. Allin deserve commendation in this, the era of mandated tolerance, sterilization and diversity? Well, it’s pretty easy to find faults with a lot of G.G.’s behavior and beliefs -- oddly, a drugged up, severe alcoholic that sings about the Klan and mutilating children probably ISN’T the best role model out there -- but at the same time, is it really all that bad to admire the dude for following his dream, and creating counter-attitudinal music that, to this day sounds true, and cutting edge, and refreshingly brutish?

G.G. was a flawed human being, no doubt. If he lived next door, you’d probably want him arrested as soon as possible. If he walked towards your girlfriend, you’d probably feel the need to ball up your fists, just in case. He died a virtually penniless heroin addict, whose life revolved around beer bottles, singing songs about torture and an unjust social system and, in his own words “staying one step ahead of the law.” He was a bandit with a guitar instead of a pistol, an outlaw with a microphone instead of a bag of looted cash. He created an entire entertainment brand, and he was nothing more than a borderline retard that slept in his own pee and allegedly lived off PB&J sandwiches and whiskey. You really can’t admire the guy completely, but as an uncompromised artiste, you have to give the guy his proper dap for being, quite possibly, the only noteworthy punk rocker in history that EVER achieved transcendent fame without ever selling out.

But alas, G.G. Allin is still dead, two decades later. And with him, all those old school rock and roll ideals -- nonconformity, artistic integrity, low-budget inventiveness and commitment to substance over style -- remain rotting in the ground with him.

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