Theodore Rex

Theodore Rex is a somewhat less illustrious entry in the “only in the ’90s” category; this simply could not have been made in any other decade. For context, let’s recall that the first half of the 1990s gave cinema such bizarre flicks as Cool as Ice and the phantasmagorical carnivalesque adaptations of the video games Super Mario Bros., Double Dragon and Street Fighter, as well as live-action Ninja Turtles. Theodore Rex has the same lineage of movies with a bizarre mix of colouring-book visuals and uniquely anti-cool coolness. Its genesis unambiguously appears to lie in the head of some producer who had seen Disney’s superb sitcom Dinosaurs and came to the conclusion that animatronic full-body dinosaur costumes were a safe commercial bet, especially when combined with the noirish buddy crime genre for child viewers. Unlike the aforementioned series, however, Theodore Rex does not offer an exaggerated alternative history, but rather a future where dinosaurs are revived by means of genetics so that they co-exist in the world with humans. Thanks to that, we have the pleasure of watching a number of good actors and personalities perform alongside rubber dinosaurs while managing to keep a straight face. However, unlike the films mentioned above, Theodore Rex is surprisingly bland and its potential for camp remains surprisingly unutilised only at the conceptual level, but not in the production itself, which is surprisingly clean in genre terms and without any exaggeration or excessive weirdness. (2018.07.10)