A look inside Hollywood and the movies : LIKE DAUGHTER, LIKE MOTHER : What Was It About ‘Rambling Rose’ That Made Dinosaurs Look So Good?

Some Academy Award-caliber actresses would never follow up a nominated performance by appearing in a Roger Corman horror movie. But Diane Ladd feels differently.

Twenty-five years after making her motion picture debut in “The Wild Angels,” produced by Corman, the reigning king of low-budget flicks, Ladd’s back starring in Concorde-New Horizons Pictures’ “Carnosaur” about genetically bred dinosaurs on the loose in contemporary times.

Sound familiar? It’s a theme not unlike that other, bigger dinosaur movie already released this summer that, coincidentally, co-stars Ladd’s daughter Laura Dern.

“Roger’s my oldest friend . . . I went down to the Chinese Theater when he got his star (on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1991), attended a luncheon in his honor and made a speech,” which, Ladd said, lead to him asking her to appear in one of his upcoming features. (He has made 175 . . . and counting.) She said she couldn’t refuse.

It was Corman, after all, who acceded to her pleas back in 1966 that she be given the chance to co-star as a “biker chick” with her then-husband Bruce Dern in “The Wild Angels” instead of just getting to play a cameo in that motorcycle genre movie of the post-Marlon Brando/”Wild One” era.

“Do you realize who’d be on the roster of people whose careers he started? I did it for him, for the money and because he agreed to let me write some of my own dialogue,” said the actress, who most recently was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in “Rambling Rose” but may best be remembered as the waitress from “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.”

Better yet, Corman paid her in advance --something of a rarity, she noted.

“Carnosaur,” directed by Adam Simon (“Brain Dead,” “Body Chemistry 2: Voice of a Stranger”), is based on a book of the same name by Harry Adam Knight. In it, a brilliant but venal geneticist (Ladd) hatches man-eating dinosaurs from chicken eggs carrying a lethal human virus and sets them loose in a small Midwest town. That “other” dinosaur movie costing more than $70 million hatched dinosaurs from genetically reconstituted DNA found in amber who run loose in a theme park.

In his review, critic Gene Siskel of “Siskel & Ebert” said Ladd was “the best thing” about “Carnosaur,” which he otherwise lauded for its “sheer goofiness.” Co-reviewer Roger Ebert’s assessment was that the dinosaurs were pretty low-tech but said he enjoyed Ladd’s “mad intensity.” Corman even weighs in on his current pet project: “It’s a screamfest!”

Audiences will find out for themselves when the movie opens Sept. 17 in Los Angeles with future cities yet to be set.

While awaiting those critical opening box-office figures, Ladd is back working on her 14-year labor of love--a biopic star vehicle based on the life of the late Martha Mitchell (the outspoken wife of disgraced former Nixon Administration Atty. Gen. John Mitchell), which Oliver Stone will produce.

“(Mitchell) shouted her mouth off when everyone else was lying . . . a very colorful character. I love her,” Ladd said, adding that she doesn’t like “playing perfect people.”

Meanwhile, maybe Corman should try calling in his chips with other people who he gave a start to: Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Joe Dante, Jonathan Kaplan, Peter Bogdanovich, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Bruce Dern, Charles Bronson, Ellen Burstyn. . . .