I love bad movies, but sometimes there are movies that are just completely unwatchable. This is one of those gems. If you’ve got some friends over that simply won’t leave, just put this in and they’ll be out of your hair in less than 15 minutes. Unless you friend is like me, then they’ll stick around to see who the movie breaks first. If you are stuck with a friend like me, make sure you always have a copy of Bed of Roses on hand. That’ll do the trick.

Remember that Jim Henson show from the early 90’s? It had a dinosaur family, they talked and wore clothes, there was a hilarious baby that said “Not the mama!”, then bonked the dad on the head with a frying pan. The baby also said “I’m the baby, gotta love me!”. I think there was a music video called “Gotta love me” (i just checked, it’s real). Anyways, the show was originally going to be the next Henson movie after Labyrinth, but once they found out about The Land Before Time Warner Brothers decided to can it for the moment. During the whole process they did get $5 million for research to design the dinosaur costumes. That eventually helped get the tv show made. It also helped another movie get made, a movie called Theodore Rex. Warner Brothers sunk over $30 million in this movie. They got the writer that was originally hired to write the Henson movie to write and direct this new blockbuster. It was originally written for Val Kilmer to play an Irish cop from the lower east side, the studio wanted Whoopi Goldberg to star instead so they made him rewrite the movie for her. I made a little timeline detailing what was going on with Whoopi during the ordeal:

1990 - Whoopi Goldberg agrees to star in a movie called T. Rex. Ghost is released to wide acclaim.
1991 - She wins an Oscar and BAFTA for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her performance in Ghost.
1992 - Sister Act is released to rave reviews. Star Trek The Next Generation is still going strong.
1993 - Whoopi is sued $20 Million for breach of verbal contract by T. Rex Productions. Sister Act 2 is released and is a hit. Whoopi loses the case and is forced to star in a movie now titled Theodore Rex.
1994 - Theodore Rex is completed and sits on a shelf for over a year. The Lion King is a hit in theaters.
1995 - Theodore Rex is released straight to video. With a $33+ million budget it easily makes it the most expensive straight to video movie at the time.
1996 - Eddie, Bogus, and The Associate all come out, no one really cares.

The movie starts out with a text crawl. “Once upon a time in the future….” - that’s the best joke in the whole movie. It’s all downhill from here folks. It goes on to say that some fancy scientist called Elizar Kane(Armin Mueller-Stahl, who won an Oscar for his next movie “Shine“) is going to bring on a new ice age and clone all new animals he keeps in his cloning ark to create his perfect world. And it happens at midnight too. 2 workers escape to tell the world of his evil plan.

One of the workers gets killed by a high pitched, lispy Zaphead(Bud Cort, Harold from Harold and Maude). The other is a dinosaur who is sent to the great tarpit in the sky by an exploding butterfly. Teddy Rex, the police dino relations dinosaur, is temporarily promoted to detective and teams up with a grumpy veteran named Katie Coltrane (Whoopi). She doesn’t want to be teamed up with a dinosaur because she’s somewhat of a “speciesist”. She seems to be the only cop in the movie that gets to wear a skin tight black leather/spandex uniform. This is truly one of the worst of the many, many offenses in this film. Oh, and it’s vaguely referred to a few times in the movie that she is part robot too. Typical unfunny zany cop movie antics litter the movie; dinosaur fart jokes, Teddy’s tail knocks over everything in sight, and bumbling henchmen to name a few.

After watching the movie I’m left with a few questions about the dinosaurs in the movie.
1. Why are they all human size?
2. Why do they wear clothes? I can understand if they wore a utility belt, or a fanny pack, but a scarf on a dinosaur serves no purpose.
3. How can they talk?
4. Why does Teddy Rex eat only cookies and never meat?
5. Why do dinosaurs need shoes?
6. Why do humans and dinosaurs dance together at a nightclub? Is the movie suggesting that dinosaurs and humans date?

Gee whiz this movie is too horrible. I don’t want to write any more about it. It’s just making me upset. Avoid at all costs.