Raptor (2001)

• Directed by “Jay Andrews” (Jim Wynorski)
• Written by Frances Doel, Michael B. Druxman, and Jaw Andrews
• Starring
  • Eric Roberts
  • Corbin Bernsen
  • Melissa Brasselle
  • Tim Abell
  • Harrison Paige
  • Lorissa McComas
• Produced by Roger Corman

*THUNK*
*THUNK*
*THUNK*

That’s the sound of me thumping my forehead on my desk beside my keyboard. (Don’t do it on the keyboard — it does nothing additional for your brain, and it only hastens the keyboard’s demise.) It’s not like I’m some neophyte to the direct-to-video world; I’ve been reviewing movies around these parts for over three years, and had watched them for my own amusement for years previous. So what incredible lapse of judgement allowed to overlook all of the many warning signs that what was contained in this video cover was not, in fact, a form of entertainment, but an exasperating irritant?

Any one of these signs should have been sufficient to give me pause. All of them together should have had me performing an exorcism right there along the New Release wall. To wit:

- Released by New Concorde, and produced by Roger Corman himself. Yes, I know Corman’s a legend, and has actually gotten many worthwhile B-flicks out to the public, but his direct-to-video efforts have always been hit-and-miss, with more misses than hits in recent years.

- Directed by Jay Andrews. If you’re up on these things, you know that “Jay Andrews” is actually a pseudonym for Jim Wynorski, B-movie director of legend. Wynorski’s normal output has always been stacked with exploitative elements, but for the last few years he’s almost exclusively worked under the Andrews name, producing and/or directing a staggering number of “techno-thrillers” — all of which revolve around stock footage of various high-tech aircraft or what have you. Go check the New Release wall again; I guarantee you’ll see at least one of these, and probably two or three of them. That should raise one of those questions best left unanswered¹: “Why’s he using his stock footage pseudonym on a movie with no airplanes?”

- There’s a picture of a T-rex on the back cover. and not just any T-rex; it’s very recognizably the T-rex puppet used in the Carnosaur movies (the handiwork of John Buechler). Which led to the following question: If this is produced by Corman, and it’s got the Carnosaur props, why isn’t it being released as Carnosaur 4? The most charitable answer would be that Corman didn’t want to upset the masses who had already invested in the Carnosaur Boxed Set. The more realistic answer was the the Carnosaur series, which didn’t exactly start out very high up the cinematic totem pole, had pretty much alienated all willing viewers by the third installment.

And oh, that last sentiment would come back to bite me in the ass, because compared to Raptor, Carnosaur 3 is freaking Citizen Kane.

We open with three joyriding teens in a jeep, drinking beer and careening over the desert landscape and generally behaving like Bad Movie Kids. Wait — does this sound familiar? That’s right; this scene was from the original Carnosaur. Itwas clipped and included in this movie verbatim. They stop on the edge of a cliff, one kid gets out to take a leak, he gets attacked by a green-lensed Steadicam, and then a puppet dinosaur finishes off the two in the jeep.

“This beret shows I am not just a mad scientist — I’m an artiste!”

And now, for some original footage: Sheriff Tanner (Eric Roberts) argues on the phone with someone at the power company about his overdue bill (wow, that’s some snarky customer service) on his way to the crime scene — i.e., a vaguely similar jeep in Bronson Canyon, nowhere near the edge of a cliff. Also on the scene is Barbara the animal control officer and former love interest (Melissa Brasselle). Their expert analysis concludes that the deaths took place in another vehicle, and motion picture, entirely. Just kidding. Barbara does discover some three-toed footprints around the vehicle, from which she estimates some kind of animal weighin in at 150-200 lbs (a helluva lot bigger than the handpuppet in the previous footage). And they hear an ominous screeching roar echoing over the hills.

Which, I suppose, is our cue to meet the individuals behind this predicament. Dr. Hyde is our designated obsessive scientist (please, we don’t call them “mad” anymore), and since it’s Corbin Bernsen, he’s playing it as — wait, can you guess? — a hard-ass! (This is the kind of guy who can proclaim, “The buck stops here” — while pointing at everybody else.) He apparently has all of three employees under him, a paunchy guy, a security chief, and a girl, none of whom held my interest enough to remember their names. Suffice it to say that he’s all concerned about the premature hatching and breakout of one of their juveniles, and orders that the gates of the Eunice Corporation (remember, that’s the company from the first film?) be locked down.

Naturally, though, one more shipment of chickens makes it out the gate. Wait — this company does poultry? They mention that a few times, but by the end of the movie, they say they’re working on Human Genome Project, so there’s no reason that they should be dealing with chickens — except that it gives us another chance to drop in a scene lifted intact from the first Carnosaur, in which a baby raptor in a truckload of chickens starts causing problems, so the driver pulls over and gets et.

Guess what you just missed seeing by about two seconds.

Immediately thereafter, a sheriff’s deputy pulls up investigate, well, a vaguely similar poultry truck parked in a completely dissimilar locale. (Boy, they’re not even trying here. One of the “arty” features of the original footage is that we see the driver get chomped in the reflection from the mirrored girlie silhouette on his truck’s mudflap. Fifteen seconds later, on what is laughably supposed to be the same truck, there are no mudflaps at all.) Deputy gets eaten by another green-lensed Steadicam.

Meanwhile, Tanner is given another distraction — his daughter Lola is seeing a guy that Dad doesn’t much like. Now, Lola is played by Lorissa McComas, who is genuinely cute, and certainly delivers her lines better than most bikini-models-turned-actress; nevertheless, if you see Lorissa in a movie’s credits, you can be sure that her real reason to be there is to eventually take off her shirt and show what skilled surgeons have gifted her with (a pity, too — they’re so terribly artificial-looking that it distracts from her honest cuteness). Even so, you’d expect them to wait a little longer before they spent that nickel, but no; it’s pretty immediately thereafter that we see her and her boyfriend going at it in the back of his truck. (Only for a split second — I hope that wasn’t the only reason you rented this mess. On the other hand, there really isn’t a bette reason to rent it. It’s just that sad.) Then there’s that weird roar again, and he gets chomped, and she tries to drive away while the raptor claws in the window, and eventually she falls from the truck while a truck from an entirely separate movie (the original Humanoids From the Deep, to be precise) goes over the edge of a bridge and explodes.

She’s brought into the hospital in “traumatic catalepsy,” which means the sheriff now has a personal stake in figuring out what’s going on. Dinos, watch out!

Meanwhile, pudge guy Lyle decides to leave the employment of Dr. Hyde. I think you can all see what’s coming here; Hyde says, “Sure, that’s fine, we’ll miss you, and by the way, can I get you to walk down this laser-lined corridor and take a look at the BIG T-rex?” Which means, by the way, that that scene from Carnosaur is dropped in here. (Guess what? Yes, they brought back the same actor. Unfortunately, he shows every one of the intervening eight years since that footage was shot — he’s now heftier, his hair is whiter and shorter, and he’s generally older. In other words, nope, I’m not convinced.)

Meanwhile, Tanner and Barbara show up at the Eunice front gate, since it was their driver that got chomped, and the security chief guy turns them away (they don’t even have a security underling who can man the front gate?), but not before they hear the T-rex’s roar echoing out of the sub-basement. Right. Funny the neighbors haven’t complained about that.

But having heard the roar, Barbara gets an idea; she inadvertantly captured the morning’s roar on her mini-tape recorder, and the doctor said that sometimes a sensory stimulus will shake someone out of catalepsy, so she plays it back for Lola, who then screams and cries on her daddy’s shoulder and tells him all about the lizard that ate her boyfriend. (Remember what I said about her acting not being too bad? Under normal circumstances that’s true, but she just can’t pull off “severely traumatized” — she seems more like she’s telling how her boyfriend stood her up for the prom.) She then leaves the movie entirely. (TAKE ME WITH YOU!!!)

As I mentioned, this movie is about enhanced and modified lifeforms…

Tanner and Barbara almost share a tender moment as he drops her off at her improbably large house, where she strips down to her Victoria’s Secret underthings for a shower before hearing an ominous something moving around in the hall. She creeps out… to discover what is perhaps the first Spring-Loaded Dog in cinematic history. (No little terrier or poodle, either — we’re supposed to believe that a golden retriever was lurking just outside the camera frame, but she didn’t see it.) And that’s all. The scene was pointless; I guess it had been a while since the killing, and they couldn’t figure out a way to get their dinosaur footage into Barbara’s shower.

The sheriff, meanwhile, is staking out the Eunice building (what, you expect to see little dinosaurs running out the doggie door?), so he’s not around when a call comes in to the station. See, there was this guy that Tanner and Ben put away a few years ago, Carl Joseph, who broke out of jail earlier in the week, and now’s he’s supposed to be in town. So Ben, the black deputy, picks up his white cowboy hat to go out and deal with him himself — and as soon as I saw the hat, I said, “Aw, crap — that’s the guy who played the sheriff in Carnosaur.” And sure enough, the whole backstory about Carl Joseph was an excuse to use the footage of the deputy/sheriff patrolling main street at night, shooting a raptor, and getting a toe claw in the gut.

So Tanner and Barbara go to the morgue the next morning to ID Ben’s body — HOLD IT RIGHT THERE, CHESTER! You mean there wasn’t a crime scene investigation last night, when somebody found a deputy’s disemboweled body in the middle of Main Street? And what about the dinosaur? Did it shrug off the effects of a shotgun blast and wander off? It did leave a trace, though, which Barbara discovers after about two seconds of examination (they let animal control officers paw around the bodies of possible murder victims?) — a three-inch tooth. Which makes absolutely no sense, as the dino we saw had teeth an inch long at best, and white ones, not black ones. Aaarrgh… *THUNK* *THUNK* *THUNK*

So Tanner calls the FBI, trying to find out some background on the Eunice Corporation. His contact hems and haws, but then immediately calls a Colonel at Project Blue Book (huh?), who oversaw the previous funding Eunice (Michael Cavanaugh, who chased Robert Hays in the Starman TV series). He calls Hyde to see if somehow “Project: Jurassic Storm” has been resurrected, which he suavely denies. (A lengthy digression would be in order here, trying to see how exactly this continuity has diverged from that set up in the original Carnosaur and largely ignored in both sequels — but that’s a whole lot of brainpower that this movie, quite frankly, doesn’t deserve.)

And now, the moment that truly stunned me. I mean, we’re in a bad science fiction movie, so a lot of things are going to make absolutely no sense, but here comes the stunner. The sheriff wants to search the Eunice building, so he tells a deputy to get him a search warrant — which he simply pulls from the filing cabinet, ready to go. Hello?!? Did anyone connected in any way with the production of this movie have any idea what a search warrant is, or how one can only be obtained after demonstrating probable cause to a judge? You don’t keep the damned things signed and ready to go in the filing cabinet!

And for a follow-up, he calls back the snooty girl at the power company and orders her to turn off the power at the Eunice building in one hour — which she reluctantly agrees to do. Again, WTF? A law officer can’t just order the cancellation of utilities at whim — and even if he could, you’re gonna have to find someone higher up the ladder than, presumably, a service rep in the billing department to get the switch thrown! *THUNK*THUNK*THUNK*THUNK*THUNK….

Naturally, when Tanner and Barbara show up at Eunice, Hyde is all smiles and guffaws, and offer to take them around personally. Now — pay attention to this — he leads them to the elevator, and two other employees get off! Wow! It’s nice to see them in evidence! Also notable is that the elevator they get into has two doors that meet in the middle… but the one they get off in the basement has a single door that rolls into itself as it slides to the right.

Eric Roberts: A fair actor, but getting a little long in the tooth.

Well, there in the subbasement, surrounded by large pipes and conduits and whatnot (according to Hyde, it takes a lot of power to “run the sequencing” — whatever…), accusations start flying. Tanner and Barbara reveal that they’ve done their research on Hyde on the Internet, which tells them he’s one of the top animal behaviorists, with with a spotty history of ethics violations, cancelled funding, etc. (Altogether now: “I read it on the Internet, so it must be true!”) Hyde just smirks and gives his “I will rewrite the history of science!” speech, and then the security chief shows up with two guards (wow! more employees!), gets the drop on Tanner, and locks the two of them in a room with an electronci lock.

Meanwhile, Colonel Whatever has done some digging, finds out that Hyde has been making a lot of phone calls to Pakistan lately, figgers that he’s resurrected Project: Jurassic Storm with foreign money, and calls in Special Ops. Which means, apparently, that there are two separate and competing teams of operatives sent to Eunice, each in their own chopper — one dressed entirely in black, and the other in black&white camo. We get to spend far too much time with time (and we will continue to do so over the next thirty minutes) as the two teams bicker by radio — and my response was, “Huh? Why would they send out two teams?” Well, it turns out there’s a reason — at least, a reason that Wynorski would want there to be two of them. Stay tuned…

The Ops teams set down at either end of the Eunice complex — which now looks rather like an isolated Nevada dam, rather than the suburban industrial park we previously saw — and start creeping through more boiler rooms and conduits. And then Tanner’s trump card gets played, and the power cuts out, releasing him and Barbara — and also shutting down the containment lasers around the big T-rex, and apparently every little T-rex. (Or raptor. Or whatever the hell they can convince us that handpuppets and men in suits are supposed to me.)

And now we find out why we’ve got two differently-dressed military teams wandering around — because this way, we can finally use the footage both from Carnosaur 2 (in which the tech team was dressed in black) and Carnosaur 3 (in which at least some of the personnel were dressed in B&W camo). Yup, the next twenty minutes will be spent with miscellaneous armed forces types firing at miscellaneous dinosaurs in generic corridors (and, in at least one instance, very obviously aboard the boat on which part of Carnosaur 3 took place, as evidenced by a life preserver on the wall). Along the way, one of the team commanders comes up with the brilliant idea of setting charges to blow up the entire complex — because as long as you’re using stock footage, it would be a shame not to include some explosions, right?

well, the helicopter pilot gets chomped and the chopper blown up (courtesy of Carnosaur 2), so they have to call in another chopper — which comes filled with a team dressed in, get this, yellow slickers. Why? So that Hyde can knock on out and slip into his slicker to sneak out. But as everyone runs for the chopper, Hyde straggles, so that the finally-free big-ass T-rex can eat him (or at least, eat someone in a yellow slicker — I don’t remember if that’s from the first or second Carnosaur, and hell, I really don’t care anymore).

“I have got to talk to my agent!”

But then, instead of escaping, Tanner (yeah, he’s still around) climbs into the driver’s seat of a bulldozer-thingie to vanquish the big lizard, courtesy of the climactic scenes of Carnosaur 2. While Barbara cowers and worries, Tanner proves his manhood by forcing the T-rex back into the complex to fall to his death down a shaft. And then it’s time for the explosives to go off, so he and she hide behind a corner while the charges do a very bad job of destroying the building. And that’s the end.

*THUNK*THUNK*THUNK*THUNK*THUNK*

I haven’t seen such an incredibly bad hackjob emerge from Roger Corman’s stamp of approval since Ultra Warrior — you’d think he’d remember what an unbearable piece of manure that was, but maybe he’s getting senile. I mean, I can understand using judicious stock footage — either generic stuff, like fighter planes or explosions, or reusable bits from earlier movies like the omnipresent space sequences from Battle Beyond the Stars; it’s no crime to amortize the cost of special effects across a half-dozen projects. But this — they didn’t film a single dinosaur for a dinosaur movie! It’s got barely enough plot to hold together the reused footage. And what plot we’ve got is underwhelming it made my ears pop, managing to stagger across the finish line at a bare 80 minutes.

Maybe — just maybe — Wynorski uses the Jay Andrews pseudonym as a subtle warning: These are the films to stay away from. I’d like to think so, and whether it’s true or not, I’ll start behaving as if it were. I mean, even if it’s not an intentional warning flag, it’s not as if I’m going to accidentally miss some quality cinema, right?

*THUNK*

A Notable Quotable:

“We’re scientists, Karen! We have to think about the bigger picture — the greater good!”

- Dr. Hyde (you knew he had to say something like that sooner or later, right?)

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 16
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 6
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actor who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • Corbin Bernsen (Dr. Hyde) played another member of the Q Continuum in the TNG episode “Deja Q”
  • Michael Cavanaugh (the colonel) played Captain DeSoto in the TNG episode “Tin Man”

1. Like, “If it’s not chocolate, what is it?”[back]