366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
DIRECTED BY: Jonathan Betuel
FEATURING: Whoopi Goldberg, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Juliet Landau, Bud Cort, Stephen McHattie, voice of George Newbern
PLOT: A cybernetically enhanced cop and a genetically restored dinosaur are paired up to solve a murder, but their investigation uncovers a larger plot to destroy humankind and bring about a new ice age.
COMMENTS: Once upon a time, the high concept of a cop paired with another, weirder cop had been efficiently reduced to its purest form by including the signifier “Heat” in the title. There was a run of movies with titles like Red Heat (cop is paired with another cop who is from the Soviet Union), Dead Heat (cop is paired with another cop who is deceased), and very nearly Outer Heat (cop is paired with another cop who is an alien) until some studio executive realized that “Heat” wasn’t moving any tickets and switched the name to Alien Nation. That one word did all the work of summing up the premise while warning savvy filmgoers to avoid it at all cost. What I’m saying is, the producers of Theodore Rex had Jurassic Heat sitting there, ready to go, and they passed. Cowards. It wouldn’t have helped the movie, mind you. It just would have saved us all a lot of time.
A mostly forgotten bomb today, if Theodore Rex has any reputation at all, it’s either as the most expensive film of its time to be released direct-to-video or as the movie that Whoopi Goldberg only agreed to appear in after the producers sued her for trying to bail on the project. This is unfair, because Theodore Rex ought to be remembered as terrible on its own merits. It’s always a delight to find a diamond in the rough, a gem that the masses were too closed-minded to appreciate, but sometimes the masses are right, and a bad movie gets the public raspberry it deserves.
The premise is so aggressively high concept that its overall illogic barely qualifies as an afterthought. You have to take a lot on faith from the outset: dinosaurs have been resurrected via hand-wavey DNA science as human-sized, English-speaking, long-armed, ghettoized cartoonish weirdos. (They are all animatronic caricatures, bumpkin cousins to the stars of the sitcom “Dinosaurs.”) The city is a Dick Tracy-style candy-colored series of backlot alleys. Whoopi Goldberg wears a skintight Lycra catsuit. If you can accept all of these ideas into your heart, then you’ve achieved the bare minimum of scrutability to get you into the plot.
About that plot. It’s already a shopworn premise — initial crime leads to bigger conspiracy — that is drained of all suspense by the inexplicable decision to reveal the identity of the villain and his elaborate scheme in the opening narration. Aside from killing the little bit of mystery the film might have, it forces the story to become a character study of two completely empty shells: Goldberg’s cop, who is so devoid of personality that she plays both by-the-book and screw-the-rules without any seeming contradiction, and Teddy the dinosaur, who combines an endless display of neuroses with the vibe of a college senior from the nerdiest frat on campus. We feel superior to them by virtue of knowing secrets that it will take them the rest of the picture to figure out, but spending time with them is a chore. About all they have going for them is that the many villains are one-dimensional, right down to the malevolent cackle, making our heroes seem emotionally rich by comparison.
It turns out, though, that the weirdest thing about Theodore Rex isn’t its oddball concept, its sad-circus production design, or any of the weak characters. No, it’s the film’s absolutely ghastly sense of humor. Public enemy #1 is the thoroughly charmless Teddy, who never stops talking, unspooling a running commentary of impressive vacuousness. He prattles on about any random thought, making it abundantly clear that Newbern was asked to freestyle in the recording booth in a desperate search for anything even lightly amusing to slap onto the soundtrack. (His Schwarzenegger impression is a low point in what is already a chasm.) Random traits like a wayward tail or a love of cookies stand in for an actual personality until some other tic can be rustled up. Goldberg, in contrast, never even makes a passing glance at humor. As if to demonstrate her continued bitterness over the legal action that forced her to be here, she spends most of her time annoyed. These two are constantly thrown into situations which are evidently supposed to be funny on their face. They ride in a garbage truck. They enchant kids when Teddy pops and locks. They ogle a dinosaur voiced by Carol Kane doing a Mae West impression. They meet a small creature in a canvas bag who calls himself “The Guy in the Bag.” Every joke is sold with a virtual elbow-to-the-ribs, but there’s not a single funny bone on the whole dig site.
Theodore Rex is a perplexingly bad movie, the kind where the most common reactions are “What?” and “Why?”, and where the overriding question is not “How did this get made?” but rather “How did this not get stopped?” There’s so much that’s wrong with the production that it’s exhausting to try and catalogue it all. Happily, I found the one moment that sums up the film in all its idiocy: the cops show up at the natural history museum where a murdered tyrannosaur has been taken for an autopsy. There, they meet the person in charge. “Dr. Armitraj,” she introduces herself. “Head dinosaur-ologist.”
Dinosaur-ologist.
And she’s tops in the department. The head dinosaur-ologist.
No irony. No nudge-nudge. They simply didn’t want to say “paleontologist” and this is what they came up with instead. DINOSAUR-OLOGIST.
Time for another asteroid.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
ADDITIONAL LINK OF INTEREST:
This oral history by SlashFilm’s Blake Harris talks to many of the production’s key players (although definitely not Goldberg). They’re not sorry, exactly, but there’s a distinct undercurrent of awkward embarrassment.
(This movie was nominated for review by Brad. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)