July 2, 1996 (in video stores)

Until now I had never seen THEODORE REX. Obviously I always intended to see it – I’m not a heathen. But I took my time, and also I always got it confused with TAMMY AND THE T-REX. Thankfully this Slam Evil Summer series gave me motivation to finally see it, so now I know what it’s all about, at least to the extent that one can know that just from watching it.

I need to come up with a name for this type of movie. It’s most similar to SUPER MARIO BROS., which also has dinosaurs and cyperpunky stuff, so I’m kinda thinking DinoPunk, Dino Noir, something like that. But they’re fantasy world-building movies, usually set in a dystopian future or alternate world, they’re usually sold as kids movies and have some aggressively juvenile humor (often perpetrated by buffoonish henchmen with wacky voices) but otherwise don’t really seem like they’re made that much for kids (like, this one has a murder investigation complete with dinosaur autopsy). Also for some reason they tend to feature souped-up garbage trucks. But the most distinguishing feature is that they’re a big mess that seems full of the sort of colorful gimmicks and special effects I love (matte paintings and huge soundstage sets depicting stylized cities, animatronic creatures) but none of it really coheres and the whole thing is a slog.

It’s possible that they started with a vague idea of what type of movie they wanted and no real premise, but more likely they just gradually drifted away from whatever the original idea was until there was not really an idea left. Other movies in this category include MOM AND DAD SAVE THE WORLD, NUTCRACKER: THE UNTOLD STORY, MONKEYBONE, and LAWNMOWER MAN 2: BEYOND CYBERSPACE/JOBE’S WAR. I think DOUBLE DRAGON may also count, and COOL WORLD, SPAWN and HIGHLANDER II: THE QUICKENING are at least adjacent.

So… Dino Wave, Dino 95, The New Dino Extremity, whatever we want to call it, that’s what THEODORE REX is, it turns out. It’s vaguely prescient-ish because it’s set “Once-upon-a-time-in the-future…” when billionaire tech lord Elizar Kane (Armin Mueller-Stahl, NIGHT ON EARTH) secretly plans to “launch his New Eden missile to bring on another Ice Age.” He wants to create a new paradise by killing mankind and then bringing back the animals. He’s known for JURASSIC PARKing extinct species back into existence (he plans to do the raccoon next) which partly but definitely not fully explains why, in this world, talking dinosaurs live among us. Just wearing clothes and acting like people and they’re not too far off from the size of people.

Our hero Teddy Rex (voice of George Newbern, FATHER OF THE BRIDE) even wears Chuck Taylors, but each shoe is three shoes connected together, one covering each of his toes. To quote Gertie in E.T., “I don’t like his feet.” But he’s a very expressive animatronic, which I do appreciate. There’s a “Dinosaurs by” credit for John Criswell (animatronic supervisor for the tv show Dinosaurs) and Chris Finch (who’s either listed wrong on IMDb or was a child dancer in the ‘80s who went on Madonna’s Who’s That Girl tour). KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE creators the Chiodo Brothers are among the puppeteers.

We meet Teddy waking up from a prophetic nightmare in his apartment. It feels pretty HOWARD THE DUCK, but there are no duck or dino boobs, and instead of fitting him into a familiar human archetype to contrast with the outlandishness of being a dinosaur they give him quirky shit: he wears a silk nightcap, he has a dog named Zippy with a doghouse and fire hydrant indoors, he has a machine that launches a cookie into his mouth. Come to think of it, somebody definitely had Pee-wee on their mind. The approach is not “Here’s a dinosaur but he’s doing normal human stuff,” it’s “Here’s a dinosaur and it’s the future so he says ‘open sesame’ and it opens the door to his weird cartoony vehicle.”

Teddy is “Assistant Press Liaison Officer with the Grid Police Department,” which he says is just a publicity stunt, so he has to beg Commissioner Lynch (Richard Roundtree, last seen in ORIGINAL GANGSTAS) to let him take on a “dinocide” case. Here I imagine they were thinking of ALIEN NATION, but without recognizing the importance of that movie following many of the conventions of the genre it’s playing off of. That’s why it was surprisingly far into the movie before I realized oh, it’s supposed to be a buddy cop movie.

I didn’t get it because he doesn’t seem like a buddy or a cop. Thankfully, despite the “Dino Detective” pulp magazine framed on his wall, he doesn’t wear a trenchcoat and fedora like Dexter Dogtective. But even when a machine gives him jeans and a leather jacket to “look more like a cop,” the Converse and red hoodie and purple turtleneck obscure those intentions.

Another reason “buddy cop movie” didn’t click right away is that the more traditional partner Katie Coltrane (Whoopi Goldberg, THE LITTLE RASCALS) wears a futuristic black leather uniform and fires grappling hooks and stuff, so she doesn’t exactly seem like Murtaugh. According to various online sources they originally wanted someone like Kurt Russell. After they got Goldberg to agree to it she tried to back out and they sued her to make her do it. To her credit though she plays it completely straight. I can imagine an even worse movie where she’s trying to make it funny.

She never lets on that it’s weird to be wearing that or to be talking to a dinosaur. The only problem is that it was a while before it became comedy-coded enough that I could be sure it even was trying to be funny. In the Dino Expressionism tradition it’s ambiguous what it’s trying to do in general, what its intentions are, what it thinks it’s doing. Weirdly it doesn’t even seem very interested in considering how life would be different for a dinosaur in the city. He’s just a guy. He’s a vegetarian so he never eats a lawyer off a toilet or anything. And pretty much the only advantage he has is that in a couple parts he knocks bad guys over with his tail, while the disadvantage is that his tail is always knocking things over or slapping a lady’s ass or whatever. Just tail-related considerations.

They try to work in some word-building shit. Dinosaurs call humans “soft skins.” They “feel for each other” so they have psychic visions about the dinocide. And either they have bad breath or Teddy specifically does. He also often farts but denies it (“I didn’t pop gas!”). He’s obsessed with cookies. He does impressions “from the old movies” including Humphrey Bogart, Arnold Schwarzenegger (but actually Hans & Franz), Sylvester Stallone and Jack Nicholson. As I said about the hamster pooping in the coffee in THE NUTTY PROFESSOR, welcome to comedy!

One of the witnesses they talk to is a lady dinosaur named Molly Rex, voiced by Carol Kane (THE PALLBEARER). She’s a singer at a dinosaur night club called The Extinct Species Club, so they were definitely thinking of Jessica Rabbit here. If she seduced a soft skin that would improve the movie.

Coltrane is friends with a kid who runs a diner that’s just out on the street. He claims he’s watching it for his dad, but I think he’s supposed to be lying and not have a dad. Either way, she’s never met the dad, but she’s close enough to the kid to ask him for a favor where he has to go into her apartment without her. He reminds me of the kid sidekick in THE ARRIVAL, and not just because he’s the same actor, Tony T. Johnson.

Kane is a dull villain, even with his variety pack of evil sidekicks – proper British lady Dr. Veronica Shade (Juliet Landau, ED WOOD), comedy-coded cyclops Spinner (Bud Cort, HEAT), long-haired killer Edge (Stephen McHattie, BEVERLY HILLS COP III), cloner on the “Ninja Grid” The Toymaker (Peter Kwong, STEELE JUSTICE). None of them good characters, but at least very different from each other. Some of them make it to the climax involving the launch of the New Eden rocket. My attention did not. I was surprised something like this could be this boring.

I did at least get a laugh from this shot at the end, where they actually did stick to the buddy-cop genre and have a hero-cop-commendation-ceremony epilogue, but with a dinosaur. This is also the only time they call him Theodore, so I choose to interpret it the same way I do the titles at the end of Christopher Nolan’s DARK KNIGHT movies. Just as it takes the events of those movies for Batman to begin, to become the dark knight and to rise, Teddy Rex had to go through this journey to truly become Theodore Rex.

Cinematographer David Tattersall had recently shot RADIOLAND MURDERS, and would later be known for THE PHANTOM MENACE. The score is by Robert Folk of POLICE ACADEMY fame, but is not as catchy. Costume designer Mary E. Vogt had done BATMAN RETURNS! But also HOCUS POCUS. But BATMAN RETURNS!

I sincerely wondered if these could’ve been some of the same soundstages used in SUPER MARIO BROS. They are not, but what do you know, production designer Walter P. Martishius was the art director for SUPER MARIO BROS. As production designer he had only done THE NEXT KARATE KID and THE SPECIALIST, but he would peddle his dino experience here into jobs on Disney’s DINOSAUR and the Dinotopia mini-series and TV show before doing more than twenty cg Barbie movies.

Interestingly the art director, Bo Johnson, had done THE ADVENTURES OF A GNOME GNORM, also a human/puppet buddy cop comedy. I bet this was the one interview where he really emphasized that part of his resume.

When writer/director Jonathan R. Betuel was only 21 he wrote The Dogfighter: A Novel of Ultimate Violence, published by Fawcett Gold Medal with the tagline, “Makes JAWS Read Like a Bedtime Story!” He broke into Hollywood when there was a bidding war for his spec script THE LAST STARFIGHTER (1984), which led to writing and directing MY SCIENCE PROJECT (1985). For a decade he worked as a script doctor and occasional TV writer (including an episode of Freddy’s Nightmares) and then, you know, this was his last directorial work. But don’t feel bad for him, because in 2002 he co-founded the visual effects studio Luma Pictures with Payam Shohadai. They debuted on CHARLIE’S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE and since then have worked on a long list of blockbusters as well as respectable films like NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD, ELVIS and THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN.

New Line originally intended THEODORE REX as a theatrical release for Christmas 1995, when it would’ve been competing with TOY STORY. After delays they test marketed in a few cities, which I think should make it count as a theatrical release (and it also played theaters in most other countries), but in most of the U.S. you couldn’t see it until video in June of ’96. At the time it was considered the most expensive DTV movie ever made. Yeah, maybe that’s the nicest thing I could say about it – it would’ve been even harder to sit through in a cheap-o version where they can’t show the dinosaurs very much.

* * *

tie-ins: There was a junior novelization by J.J. Gardner and a picture book by Jane B. Mason. “Based on the mega-saurus new movie from New Line Cinema!”