Theodore Rex / YMMV

Ass Pull: The film couldn't be bothered to come up with a good reason why Elizar Kane decided to revive dinosaurs as intelligent, anthropomorphic beings aside from a quick line from him remarking that he wanted to show how "science could change the world."
Audience-Alienating Premise: A notorious example of such, so much so that its inconsistent tone leads to a glaring case of Uncertain Audience, further alienating viewers with its inane plot and the poorly-designed animatronic puppets. Unsurprisingly, it failed spectacularly with test audiences and wound up being released direct-to-video.
Bile Fascination: Quite a limited number of people have bought and watched the movie just to see how atrocious it is.
Complete Monster: Elizar Kane is the head of New Eden, a powerful billionaire, and directly or indirectly responsible for the crimes in the movie. Kane became a pillar of society by bringing back extinct species through cloning, especially his recreation of the dinosaurs, appearing as an empathetic father figure to them, but was unable to accept imperfections or flaws of the world; as such, he plans to launch a missile with the power to wipe out the world and recreate it in his own image. Kane has two employees who attempted to leak the truth killed, setting the events of the movie in motion, and has two other lackeys who failed him killed. When Teddy and Coltrane uncover his plans, he has Coltrane's young friend Sebastian kidnapped, along with Teddy's Love Interest Molly. Kane states he needs Teddy because he needs two Rex's as part of his cryogenic Ark plan, later trying to gun down Teddy and Coltrane when Teddy fights against him.
Questionable Casting:
- This is not one of Whoopi Goldberg's better movie choices. Sure, the studio threatened to sue her if she walked off the set, and she decided to do the movie so she would avoid what happened to Kim Basinger with Boxing Helena, but it only succeeded in knocking her off the A-list.
- Richard Roundtree? What are you doing here?!
Retroactive Recognition: Yup, that's Superman and Sephiroth's voice coming from the body of an anthro, cookie-loving Tyrannosaurus.
Special Effects Failure:
- The dinosaur suits in this movie are only slightly better than Industrial Light & Magic's effort in Howard the Duck. Which reflects badly on both this (considering it was made a year after Jurassic Park) and Howard (considering not only it was made for a lower budget than that film but ILM's reputation as the definitive SFX powerhouse in Hollywood). It stings further when you realize that several members of the effects staff also worked on Dinosaurs, a series with more stylized characters but more effective animatronic effects.
- At one point, the eyes on the Theodore suit stop working properly.
- Many of the puppets are downright ugly to look at. And some don't even look like they're moving.
- As this interview mentions, there were constant problems with the mechanics behind the scenes as well. A combination of the controls being broken, coupled with the cold weather during filming meant that the animatronics didn't work as well as expected. And it shows.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
- The concept of an anthropomorphic Tyrannosaurus rex as a policeman of the future sounds like it could've been some of the best Crazy Is Cool ideas out there, doesn't it? Too bad this movie screwed it up royally.
- Even by this movie's standards, some of its own ideas are dropped without any payoff. Best of the Worst points out that the fact that all the dinosaurs have psychic powers and can speak with one another telepathically has no payoff other than serving as Theodore's motivation to take the case. Psychic dinosaur detectives of the future. How can you possibly do so little with that idea?
Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Thanks to a combination of terrifying designs and barely working animatronics, the dinosaurs do not look convincing in the slightest.
What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: It's really hard to tell just what audience this movie would have been shooting for, especially if it had made it to theaters. Theo's sickeningly cute love of milk and cookies seems to keep it well within the realm of kiddie movies — and then you get a scene that's as violent as any given cheap sci-fi B-movie.

YMMV / Theodore Rex

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