Unentertainment

Scintillating Sci-Fi Flick Movie Film Motion Picture of the Week: Raptor

 

Ratings: 2.6/10 IMDB, 19% Rotten Tomatoes

Setting the Stage: This classic motion picture sets the tone early, with a group of college students driving their jeep to the edge of a desert cliff to drink some beers.  Even though this seems like a pretty good idea, things take a turn for the worse when they are instantly mauled by a raptor (played throughout the movie by raptor dolls held up close to the camera).  The audience gets to see the attack through the eyes of the raptor itself (You can tell it’s raptor-vision because the your TV screen is tinted green, duh.). One thing you will notice about the raptor throughout the film is that it has been conditioned to attack the stomach and only the stomach of its targets, as we can see from the following chart:     

Source: The Discovery Channel

It turns out that some indeterminate amount of raptors have escaped from some lab operated by a scientist (“Dr. Hyde”…yep, creative name) who had been developing dinosaurs for military purposes until the government shut him down, as if that was going to stop him.  After being alerted to his continued genetic experiments, the government gets involved, sending multiple teams in to bust up the operation, including one unit wearing winter camouflage (to infiltrate a lab which is indoors), a unit wearing berets, and finally, a unit wearing—why not?—raincoats.  It’s very unclear what any of these teams are doing, particularly the raincoat gang, which runs into the facility and then immediately runs out of it, having accomplished the feat of lightly jogging 200 feet, but not accomplishing much as far as containing rogue reptilian beasts.  

Fortunately, local sheriff Eric Roberts is also on the case, and before you know it, a bunch of fundamentally confusing and stupid things are happening, with the movie culminating in Roberts fighting the boss T-Rex (which, scientifically speaking, is not a raptor—the creature the movie was named after) with a Bobcat (much more on this later).  As you watch this film you will be constantly reminded of how far film-making has come since the early 70’s. Except this was filmed in 2001. 

Most Valuable Actor: Roberts. Throughout a movie with some questionable acting and an even more questionable storyline, E-Rob never breaks stride, with a consistent pretty-boy smirk on his face, and an ever-present self-confidence that borders on cockiness.  He also does some pretty convincing facial grimacing and straining in the final climatic sequence (see “Best Scene”). 

Most Valuable Actress: Lorissa McComas. Apologies to Melissa Brasselle, who plays E-Rob’s love interest Barbara in the film; despite giving her best acting effort in the form of not mispronouncing too many words, even exchanges such as the following were not enough to garner her best actress distinction:

Dr. Hyde: Your lady friend isn't a very good poker player, Sheriff. She's just revealed her hand.

Barbara: Actually, I prefer dominoes.

Burn.

No, the best actress in this movie is Lorissa McComas, who plays Roberts’ daughter to over-acting perfection.  Her shining moment comes after watching her boyfriend get disemboweled by a raptor (she narrowly escapes death) when she is locked in a fear-triggered coma (a completely not made-up medical condition) and remains frozen with a look on her face that very well could be a look of terror.   

Her semi-conscious body is taken to a hospital (played by a bed and breakfast room with a guy dressed up vaguely like a doctor standing in it), where the best exchange in the film takes place.

Best Exchange:

Doctor: "I'm afraid your daughter is suffering from a rare form of traumatic catalepsy."
Roberts: "And that would be what, doctor?"
Doctor: "Well, something so terrified your girl that she shut off part of her mind to avoid thinking about it."
Roberts: "That's not like her."

He knows his daughter very well apparently. 

Best Scene: There are a lot of continuity errors in this movie. Day turns to night and back within individual scenes, the windows on the jeep in the beginning are plastic and then glass and then covered in blood and then less bloody plastic, and so on.  There is a scene involving a truck crashing off a bridge that really cannot even be described except to say that there are about 17 things fundamentally wrong with the 15-second sequence.  So it really takes something drastic to stand out in a film like this, but the final scene does just that. 

Basically, a tyrannosaurus rex escapes the lab and is on the verge of wiping out all of the main characters plus the raincoat brigade, when Roberts hatches a plan.  He sees a white front-end loader Bobcat sitting by the lab, and promptly boards it and fires up the engine.  From here, there are a lot of close-ups of E-Rob grunting while working the controls as he is locked in basically a sumo match with the dinosaur.  Only the white Bobcat periodically becomes a much larger, yellow machine with forklift attachments, and then later, a similar forklift with a huge mechanical arm.  After finally dispatching of the t-rex by pushing it into an underground shaft, Roberts hops out of—a small, white Bobcat (with a smirk on his face, of course).  It really has to be seen to be believed; this sequence alone is enough to make the movie worth watching. 

Bonus “Did you know?” about Raptor courtesy of IMDB: “The Purex Poultry truck is a Mitsubishi Fuso.”

Important information.  Thanks IMDB.