Lost World - Predatori del mondo perduto

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.

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.

Horrible CGI, horrible effects, and horrible acting. When I first saw the raptors, I was immediately reminded of Turok. When the raptors got shot, I was reminded of horribly crude video game violence and paintball combined, and then their wounds magically disappeared. When a guy got eaten, their bodies became puddles of blood and a few clothing fragments... no bones, no organs, no nothing. And they sounded like the lions in Zoo Tycoon.

Another thing I hoped was that they would make the raptors smarter than this... when hunting, they stood there and watched the people as they fired at them.

Dinosaur fans and raptor fans... go watch JP instead. A 4/10 movie.

This move was a 10.5 on our Cheez-o-meter, the highest ranking possible, thanks to the earthquake movie of the same name. We knew we were setting ourselves up for a lambasting with "Raptor Island", we just didn't realize how badly.

OK, so the movie is made on the super cheap, with crappy CGI, models that scream "REVELL!!" and an utterly ridiculous plot scenario. I can get past a lot of cheapness necessitated by TV movie budgets, but what I cannot accept is the flagrant carelessness of the director. C'mon, people, the story takes place on an island in the South China Sea: so why are we looking at boreal forest, replete with ivy-covered trees, in what is obviously fall? During the scene where Hack and Jamie are holed up in the plane wreckage, their breath is clearly visible when they speak. Sorry, folks, no matter how you slice it, British Columbia can never stand in for a tropical island.

And what was with that weather at the end? The captain says their "socked in" "in this pea soup", but the island is having a lovely red sunset. Cut to helicopter pilot guy, shown in the cockpit with a raging ocean behind him. Cut to island sunset. Cut to helicopter flying over wrecked zodiac - it's night. Cut to Hack and Jamie, fighting off the bad guy, in full daylight. Cut back to pilot, shown in cockpit with that same raging ocean behind him. Cut to sunset. WASN'T ANYONE PAYING ATTENTION? Could they have at least TRIED to seem as though they were trying to be credible? Though this one was ripe for Joel and the Bots, we had plenty of fun of our own. Sublimely silly and purely ridiculous, there is no excuse to watch "Raptor Island", unless you're socked in by pea soup. Which we were.

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.