Raptor Island

Title: Raptor Island
Rating: 1.5/5
Genre: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi (Comedy)
Starring: Lorenzo Lamas, Steven Bauer, Hayley DuMond
Director: Stanley Isaacs

This is technically the best film I’ve seen all year (being the first), and yet one of the worst I’ve seen in my life. Even calling it 'craptor island' feels as though too much effort has gone in to insulting it and I’m going to have to be very careful in dictating just how awful this film is as I’m struggling to thing of a single aspect with any merit, and yet, this is actually what makes this film enjoyable. Yes, there are more plot holes than plot, even ignoring the ludicrous ‘explanations’ proffered throughout and I’m sure most will have seen a finer lesson in acting from a primary school play but just when you think things couldn’t become any worse, this film proves you wrong once again.

Allow me to run you through the opening moments; we see an American in uniform giving a speech to other uniformed men, no names are spoken. In enters “The Captain,” (yes, that is his name for the entire film), “God speed” he says, they’re off to get the bad guys. Suddenly we find ourselves on a boat, the Americans are shooting people who are shooting back, the anticipation and excitement is less for the action itself but more for the question of who the enemy is and why they’re shooting each other. A glimpse of what could be a Russian accent – at this point I’m not sure, its pretty awful and could be just about anything, but we all know how much Americans love to portray Russians as bad guys – and they’re off, one of them is dragging a woman behind them. Clearly they’re the evil characters as she doesn’t look happy about it, and since the only reason I can think for them wanting to drag her is the fact she’s the only woman in the film (they need to satisfy their urges somehow) I don’t blame her and if you saw this guys ugly mug you wouldn’t either.

Still on the boat, a shaking camera used to generate atmosphere shows them both running around some generic metal hull (or perhaps the camera was just heavy, it’s hard to tell), and we finally get a short scene of the two small boats heading for land nearby. The Americans are still hunting the bad guys! It is on this island that they will relentlessly hunt each other for about five minutes before abandoning their mission thanks to the resident dinosaurs, but even that is topped when its soon discovered the entire island is going to blow up. Oh, and naturally they can’t radio for help because of some mysterious interference. Why are there extinct dinosaurs on this island? Radiation. Why can’t they get a message out? Radiation. Why is the island gonna explode? Radiation. I’m betting if they could find a way of blaming the cheap CGI and bad acting on radiation as well, they would.

Even more fascinating than this mysterious radiation though, is that apparently this island is even more magical than you would think; time is different here, days are weird lengths and daylight can come and go within five minutes; the active volcano never stops releasing ash into the air (travelling directly upwards I might add) creating a beautiful sunset; and despite being in the South China Sea, the entire island is void of tropical plant life, instead filled with maple and oak trees. Impressively, despite these shortcomings it is not the plot-holes that really get me but the acting.

Only three people say anything beyond ‘oh shi-’ and of those three, precisely none have anything worthwhile to add. ‘Inspirational’ talks consist of beastie boy lyrics such as “lets get this party started” and "you gotta fight for your rights." People will ‘trip’ over huge logs right in front of them, walking forwards, facing forwards, and then literally do a flying leap through the air, only to get up dazed and confused. People get shot and go ‘oh’ before running off – I’ve seen paintball guns have a bigger force of impact – and this film claims host to one of the most hilarious deaths I’ve seen in recent memory where once shot, the soldier does a slow-motion fall, except they forget to tell the guy behind him to do the same who instead continues frantically shooting at the enemy (he was later disintegrated for this).

Which brings me to my next point, that the highly trained soldiers (Navy Seals as it turns out) subscribe to a ‘spray and pray’ shooting technique and are physically incapable of seeing the 10ft monstrosities unless they’re a few yards away in plain sight directly in front of them, and even then they look surprised. At one point the second in command decides he’ll stay behind to cover his leaders ass despite the fact no raptors were following them, running towards a few to get himself killed. Gravely injured men run marathons, and the most convincing actor is a hack. (No really, his name is hack). We never learn where the enemy is from, but we later learn he’s called ‘Azir’ and is called a terrorist a lot, which makes me think my initial Russian assumption was wrong; the cold war has been and gone and now we’ve moved on to mocking the middle east with hilariously bad films, though where in the middle east is never disclosed.

I have been careful thus far to avoid commenting on the CGI as I accepted that this was a budget affair and so my expectations were low in this regard, but this really is the icing on the shitcake. The actual design of the raptor’s themselves are somewhat passable and if that was the worst thing about them then all could be forgiven, but it gets worse. When shot the bullets leave no mark beyond a small perfectly distributed ‘splat’ of red that had me thinking of the old ‘House of the Dead’ games, (except not quite that realistic), capable of instantly healing without a trace until they finally inexplicably collapse, but even that pales in comparison to when you see them devour a corpse only to have them instantly transform it into bloody leaves. Between the vaporised raptor bodies (sometimes when shot they vaporise. Your guess is as good as mine here) and their disintegrating touch there is much here to be mocked, and yet after all my derision, ultimately it managed to keep me entertained (bewildered but amused) for the most part and that’s all I really hoped for.