Raptor Island II: Planet Raptor

Title: Raptor Island II: Planet Raptor
Rating: 2/5
Genre: Action, Horror, Sci-Fi
Starring: Steven Bauer, Vanessa Angel, Ted Raimi, Musetta Vander
Director: Gary Jones

I honestly didn't intend to watch another film with Vanessa Angel, but the presence of her figure can never really be a bad thing. After watching the first film which just barely clung on to my attention enough to prevent me falling asleep, it would take something special to make me return, but the premise for this is special indeed. The year 2066 rolls on by and we discover that raptors have inhabited a distant planet inhabited by badly ripped off bug designs leftover from “Starship Troopers,” except these bugs are friendly. Left for dead on the planet and forced to fend for themselves, they seek revenge on those who sent them on a suicide mission. Again, like “Starship Troopers.”

Conveniently radiation appears once more as an end-all excuse to piss people off, this time preventing any signal from reaching their ship up in the sky and get them beamed out, and it takes them the entire film to remember the alien distress signal that got through and reached them from a different galaxy and realise that oddly, it might be useful. Of all the characters only one (Bauer) is given a backstory, and all that does is makes you wish he would die soon despite knowing he probably won't, one hot scientist (Angel) who screams and runs around pretending she has high heels on, one hot tough chick (Vander) for the others to hit on, and the doctor (Raimi) whose only job is to sneak up behind people and inject them with various drugs. Naturally, there's plenty of cannon fodder who are easily identified by the fact they look like they should be in star trek uniforms and are always referred to as 'Ensign,' just in case we ever got confused. In fact, only 'Pappy' – the old chiselled veteran marine – has any kind of personality, and despite being derived almost entirely from one-liners it still makes him the most likeable of the bunch. It would also turn out that my hopes for a bad dinosaurs in space film would quickly be dashed by the throwaway dialogue explaining why the planet looks like something out of the middle ages and why they're still using AK-47's and C4 as opposed to the infinitely more amusing 60's style Star Trek laser guns.

The dinosaurs, too, didn't exactly look like they had seen much work since the dog shit prequel, the effects used in one of two ways; puppets that look about as realistic as the plastic dinosaur toy they sell at your average toy store and CGI images that give them a bizarrely smooth purplish hue. The attacks scenes are no better, using fake blood to compensate for shoddy work creating a few bizarrely hilarious moments. Sometimes these raptors are 6 feet tall, but sometimes they're 30ft tall. Sometimes, they morph into stock footage of a T-Rex for the hell of it, and sometimes they can run full pelt at you with the best part of a magazine of ammo in their body, but sometimes one well placed bullet can stop the creatures dead. It's pretty clear nobody intended to make a 'good' film and with the melodramatic acting, witty one liners and eventual inclusion of laser guns, there are points where it picks up the pieces and produces something interesting. It would have been a real feat if that made something worse than the prequel but this certainly wasn't as bad as that.