Raptor Island ,...the...gag..gag...review

[trekgeezer]

Okay there are different kinds of cheese, this is one is like that piece of cheddar sitting in the fridge unwrapped for about a month or so.

While the beginning credits are rolling we see a  DC-3 cargo plane traveling through a storm  (an obviously toy DC-3 which looks  to be controlled by strings) which is carrying a single crate lashed down with chains. It  gets hit by lightning and goes down.

We are then told it is 40 years later and we see Lorenzo and  the most inept  group of special ops military guys on the planet preparing for a mission.  They are going to rescue some UN types taken hostage by Steven Bauer's character (whose name I cannot remember other than it is middle eastern).  Anyway, Lorenzo and crew storm the ship,  start shooting at the guys with the hostages (always a dependable way to get them back alive), but  Bauer and crew get away with one in a speed boat . This shootout tried to make use of the handheld camera effect, but was really disorienting and annoying (I thought I was watching Battlefield Earth for a minuter there). The specops  guys set charges on the ship (it is filled with stolen ordnance), and then pursue the bad guys in their Zodiac .

This is where we end up on Raptor Island  and the carnage begins.  Once the marines have landed, Bauer sends two of his henchmen back to the beach to get rid of their pursuers boat . One guy knifes the Zodiac while the other gets scarfed by a trio of badly rendered raptors.  The action pretty much turns to the stupid from  this point and this was less than 15 minute into the movie.

I have to say the bullet impact effect on the dinos was really bad and the number of bullets required to kill one ranged from three to fifty, that is when any actually hit them . These guys were supposed to be Navy Seals and one guy shot  at least 20 rounds to kill a baby raptor not  5 feet away from him.

The hostage ends up being a female undercover CIA agent , who is apparently an expert in seismology, palientology, nuclear physics, genetics, is afraid of skeletons and joined the CIA to get revenge against the terrrorists.  

 Seems the dinos were mutated when a cargo plane they find crashed with a container of  plutonium  aboard . They evidently were living there before, but that is never specualted on.  We get to see a group of raptors about to attack Lonrenzo  suddenly chomped upon by what looked like a  T-Rex (it had little horns , so it may have been an allosaurus).  The radiation also makes their radios and tracking devices not work.
 
There is also a giant,  active volcano on the island.  This is of course where the remaining good guys go to find a cave to hide in, which is also about  200 yards from the cavern where the raptor colony lives.

Lorenzo goes to find water for one of his remaining two men that is wounded. Meanwhile,  Ms. CIA does that stupid people in movies thing and wanders off to explore the cave.  Unwounded guy leaves wounded guy to look for CIA lady and ends up as lunch.  She later asks why he would leave his post like that.  Wounded guy sacrifices his life so Lorenzo and the girl can get away.  

Later  Lorenzo and CIA girl cross a stream filled with gas and sulfur  (from the venting volcano)  and get covered from head to foot with mud, and guess what ? A raptor strolls by, sticks his face about two inches away from the girl but can't see them or smell them!  (the sight thing is  radiation mutation and smell is explained by the sulfur)

They have to get back to the beach by 0300, which is either afternoon or evening depending on which part of the scene you are in.  Anyway they have to get there in hopes someone will be looking for them, since their radios don't work.  So to avoid getting eaten while making it there, they decide to go back and blow up the dino village.

Now at this point I am wondering how much damage a claymore mine will do to rocks, since they are an antipersonnel weapon (they shoot shrapnel and only in one direction).  But that is far from the worst technical mistake in this turkey.  CIA girl gets attacked by a raptor who refuse to die after being shot in the head about 30 times and falls into a cavern occupied by Steven Bauer. Lorenzo in the mean time has set off the claymores making the lava flow which consumes the raptor colony.  

Girl gets away from Bauer and finds Lorenzo. Bauer appears and wants to surrender (he is on the other side of the lava flow), but  Lorenzo tells him to save his ammo because raptors are about to jump him.

Meanwhile a helicopter is looking up and down the island for them and is just leaving when they hit the beach . He sees their tracking signal and goes back. Bauer shows up, shoots at helicopter , Lorenzo returns fires back from the chopper and naturally, not being able to hit the side of a barn, he misses.  Bauer then turns into breakfast for the T-Rex or allorsaurus or whatever.  We see the chopper flying into the sunrise, with surprise, a group of raptors swimming along behind.

Steven Bauer is the lucky one in this movie, he gets to slink around hiding  and not having to recite inane dialog for about 90% of the film.

Lorenzo and CIA girl get play all the scenes ripped from Jurassic Park and Predator.  Lorenzo gets to emote with all the sensitivity of  a wooden plank.  While the hardened CIA agent acts like a school girl.  Everyone else  is dino chow from the beginning.

[I luv dolma]

Yeah the movie really stunk. I remember when they first announced it, and I got excited; being a fan of Corman's carno films and all.

PS: The laugh-out-loud part of the film was when Lorenzo immediatly noticed that the plane wreckage was over 30 years old, even though it was really just a plastic prop covered with recently trimed tree branches and twigs and leaves....

AND WHAT WAS WITH THE CGI CRATE IN THE BEGINNING OF THE MOVIE? THEY COULDN'T EFFORD A REAL WOODEN CRATE?

[trekgeezer]

Was there a cavern under the wreck? My wife noticed the thing couldn't have been nearly as big  as when they got inside it.

The films they show  that are made by UFO have far superior  CGI than this thing did.

[Dunners]

ha, another 'scifi original 'eh?;)

[JohnL]

I started watching this and it was so stupid that I actually started taking notes about all the stupid things I noticed;

The toy plane in the beginning was bad. They should have at least slowed down the film a little to make it look like it had some weight.

They wait until the captain of the ship wishes them luck to start gearing up for the mission.

The firefight on the ship is a typical movie firefight where it seems to go on forever. It's my understanding that most special forces hostage rescues are over in about 20 seconds.

As soon as the firefight starts, the camera starts shaking for no reason. The ship wasn't sinking or exploding, so there's reason for the shaky-cam.

After talking about how the terrorists are holding a bunch of people hostage, they don't bother to check the ship for anyone else before deciding to blow it up.

Speaking of that, why did they blow up the weapons rather than recovering them?

Then they keep switching to show the bomb timer slowly counting down for what seems like an eternity.

While the bad guys are walking through the woods, one of them falls and takes forever to get back up, while his friends just leave him behind.

Why did the bad guy send his men back to destroy the raft anyway? If the soldiers wanted to leave the island, they'd just take the bad guys' boat instead. It makes no sense to destroy one and leave the other.

Not that it mattered much, since the idiot sniper then shoots the boat's engine, blowing it up in the process. Yeah, way to go stupid!

When the leader of the bad guys tries to kill the woman, she uses one of the other bad guys as shield and naturally the bullets don't go through him.

I loved when Lorenzo whips out his little tracking device and takes readings from a screen that just says "Target Acquired". Seems like someone forgot to tell the CGI dept. to put an actual tracking display on it.

They discover cannisters with a radiation warning on them and just stand around looking at them. Umm, hello? Radiation lasts a LONG time...

They said that the radiation was responsible for mutating the raptors. From what???

They discover that the raptors have a nest in the cave, so where do they decide to spend the night? In a different part of the same cave!

Several times, they're shown still firing long after the raptor they're shooting at has fallen. I guess the editor didn't feel the need to match the live action to the CGI.

Every time they're confronted by raptors, the dinos patirntly wait fort he humans to finish their discussion before attacking.

One minute Lorenzo and the woman are wading through the swamp, seconds later they're covered in mud from head to toe. Look like they left out a scene.

The dino not seeing them because of the mud was a direct Predator ripoff.

I seem to recall a thread here about characters in movies outrunning things like explosions. Now we have Lorenzo outrunning lava.

The CIA woman falls in a hole in the cave, then Lorenzo floods the entire cave in lava, but it somehow misses the hole she fell into?

Not to mention that in several scenes, the humans were only a couple feet away from lava, but yet suffered no ill effects. The typical stove burner only goes into hundreds of degrees, but you wouldn't want to hold your hand over one for more than a second or two. Lava is several thousands of degrees. How long would a person last near that kind of heat?

Lorenzo at the end not being able to hit the bad guy looked like another case of bad editing where he didn't know that the scene would end up making him look incompetent.

I did notice a couple marginally good things about this film;

The dino effects weren't the worst I've ever seen.

They made the cave scenes look at least semi-realistic. Most films just have generic looking rock walls and a perfectly even floor so that the actors can run through the tunnels easily.

Speaking of the cave, I though the mouth of the cave looked like the same one used in one of the giant snake movies. Did anyone else notice this?

[Jack Corbett]

Gee. Must be s**t.

[Master Blaster]

Hey, Jack. Pace yourself. Posting to all these old threads is just going to annoy the regulars.

[Jack Corbett]

Ah. sorry, I just find too many topics I wasn't here to see.

[Mr. Hockstatter]

That's a fantastic review - good job!  I really liked the scene where Lamas was shooting at the guy from the helicopter but they didn't match up the shooting / being shot at scenes too well, and it's obvious he's aiming about 30 feet over the guy's head.  Or the part where the guy sacrifices himself so Lamas and the girl can live, but, um, weren't they only about 5 feet from safety?  Oops, sorry buddy.

The bullets hitting the raptors was absolutely a hoot.  Big explosions of blood that disappear instantly.  At least nobody actually walked through a poorly rendered CGI raptor.  

Overall, it could have been a good bad movie if it hadn't dragged so much in the middle.  And perhaps the movie makers could take the time to watch one of those Discovery Channel shows about Navy SEALS, it would really help.  Like, if there's a raptor standing 10 feet in front of you, aim at it;  Don't spray bullets in a wide arc all over the place.  That is wasteful.

[Brother Ragnarok]

The dinosaur with horns, presuming you mean they were over its eyes, could also have been supposed to be a Carnotaurus depending on how big the horns were.  And if it had one on its nose as well, it was most likely a Ceratosaurus.
Both T-Rex and Allosaurus had bone ridges over their eyes (the Allosaur's were more pronounced), whereas the Carnotaurus had actual horns.