Raptor Island

I happened to have just finished watching Raptor Island, and my god it was awful! Now I'm usually very glad to watch horrible B rated movies(Frankenfish was my favorite) but this was crap! CRAP! The acting was terrible. There was one part where one Navy Seal TRIPS OVER A LOG AFTER HE LOOKS BACK AND SEES IT only to be eaten by the raptors. Oh what they aren't raptors! They're mutated dinosaurs! Not only are they the fake st things i have ever seen, they get shot and ignore the bullets! Its like a video game. They shoot the "Raptors" an the bullets disappear to leave no wound. And when a "Raptor attacks someone, in less than two seconds there's nothing but a blood stain! Way to go Sci Fi! Way to go!

I just watched this on Sci-Fi last night. It's about a group of Navy SEALS who are sent to rescue some sort of CIA operative from a ship, where she's being held by terrorists. Afterwards, the terrorists flee to some island, still with their prisoner, and the SEALS pursue. The SEALS get the CIA person back, but by then they've discovered that the island is overrun by raptors.

Much bad CGI and firing of ammo follows.

Actually, there is some good CGI in the movie, like when they're in the cave which is the "incubator" for the raptors. That looked pretty cool. But most of the raptors that are running around in the woods, well, they look a little worse than the ones in The Lost World TV show, and when the SEALS shoot at them and blood starts spurting out, it's straight out of a video game. You will not be able to stop laughing at some of those scenes. And the raptors just stand there, totally oblivious to the fact they're being shot. One of them takes about 50 rounds to the butt, which is really hilarious because you'd think he'd turn around and see what's going on back there, but he doesn't.

Another thing that's annoying is that the SEALS suffer from a complete and utter lack of peripheral vision. A terrorist can be crouched behind a small tree as a soldier walks by, then the camera pans down and you see the terrorist, and realize there's no possible way that the soldier could have not noticed him. And, since they chose to call these guys SEALS, which makes one think they're highly trained, why do they never aim their weapons at anything? A raptor can be right in front of them and instead of aiming at it, they spray rounds back and forth in a wide arc.

The whole movie is full of such silliness. After being instructed to conserve their ammo, they fire an extra fifty rounds into a raptor that's already dead. It's all this inattention to detail that makes it abundantly clear throughout the film that you're not watching a "real" movie.

But, the last one minute of the movie almost makes it worth it. Some pretty cool CGI, and the best line of the whole movie is the last one.

Pretty sorry effort. I'm not sure who did a worse job, the director, the CGI guys, or Lorenzo Lamos... Lamos, who's never been that good, just really sucks this time out. It looks like he isn't even trying....

A good director probably could've made this a halfway decent B movie. The CGI wouldn't have been nearly as bad if they'd not held the shot for so long and had planted a few squibs in the forest to add to the illusion that they were actually getting shot. I presume this Navy seal raid had to happen in the daytime simply because the production couldn't afford to light a night scene, but I guess these guys have never heard of shooting day-for-night.

Some of the cheapest looking CGI creatures you'll ever see attack some of the most poorly trained mercenary troops to ever brandish fake looking weapons on a bogus "South Sea island" set (in Canada). The goofs are endless, the script resembles mangled Swiss cheese, and the story is pretty much a chaotic maze of nothingness.

The Raptor attacks are priceless. Usually they stand around, hanging out in groups doing nothing, as nitwit Green Beret wanna-be's pepper them with hundreds of rounds, and they just kind of stare in stupefied apathy as the useless bullets shower them. One of two things always happens: Either they get sick of being shot at, and they gang tackle the victim and then some animated blood spurts around; or a poorly done CGI red blotch appears on the poor confused Raptor and it drops over in a heap, never losing that silly grin they always seem to have. The chronological order for the victims-to-be is so obvious, they might as well have had numbers painted on their faces.

Viewers definitely need to "turn off the brain" for this material. The writer, director, and cast certainly did.

Raptor Island is a Science Fiction channel revival of all those dinosaur films from the Cold War era where radiation is responsible for all kinds of strange beings.

In this case a cargo plane crashed some time during the sixties on a volcanic island in the South China Sea, spilling radioactive material on the island.

Fast forward to the War on Terror and a Navy SEAL team group headed by Lorenzo Lamas is trying to rescue a CIA agent Hayley DuMond from a group of Moslem terrorists headed by Steven Bauer. The terrorists, the SEALS and the CIA agent all wind up on that same island where in thirty years, raptors have returned to life and are multiplying exponentially.

All the clichés from those Cold War films are carefully preserved and recycled for the War on Terror. Despite the even more sophisticated weaponry of 2004, I can't believe how any of them survive. They should all have been raptor puppy chow as Lorenzo Lamas puts it.

In terms of special effects, Jurassic Park it ain't. And the players can barely keep a straight face. Raptor Island is worth a few laughs.

And if you can believe it, the Science Fiction channel has a sequel for this film, Raptor Planet.