THE INVISIBLE RAPTOR - Mark Reviews Movies

The Invisible Raptor, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 5, 2024

There are no set-in-stone rules to making a "good" bad movie, because it's almost certain that no genuinely terrible movie was made with the goal of being so. Some have tried to intentionally make a bad movie for laughs, but that's close to describing the apparent intentions of the makers of The Invisible Raptor. It's not quite there, because the movie is a comedy first and foremost. Director Mike Hermosa just happens to be using the gimmick of a cheap, phony blockbuster as the foundation for the humor.

It's a strange experience that's not quite a parody—despite the many, many references to other movies—and definitely not a satire, because the juvenile humor of the whole thing makes one imagine the filmmakers would scoff at that description. Trying to describe it is difficult, but getting to the point of why the movie doesn't succeed is much easier. It has one genuinely clever joke, about three decent ones, and several other duds, and screenwriters Mike Capes and Johnny Wickham keep making them over and over again.

It's a lengthy exercise in silliness, too, clocking in, somehow, at nearly two hours, even though the one solid gag is first established right at the start. From there, it's pretty much downhill, although the pure, deliberate ridiculousness of some of this material means it is amusing from time to time. The repetition of the jokes wears thin, but sometimes, the repeated assault of a single joke does wear down one's defenses.

Take, for example, our hero Dr. Grant (Mike Capes). His last name may be Walker, but the filmmakers obviously want us to think of a particular dinosaur movie franchise with the guy's title and first name. How do we know that? Well, the characters have seen those movies, too, and they're the only way to describe the central threat of the plot, which we'll definitely be getting to.

Anyway, Dr. Grant is a formerly renowned paleontologist who now works at a dinosaur-themed amusement park that's ostensibly a museum. His big discovery was the fully intact "butthole" of a dinosaur, and the wording here is important, because it's how everyone describes his greatest achievement. Some will find this funny once. Others will think it's just part of the long list of other jokes about childish language, and a few might eventually laugh at one instance of the joke, such as when a shot of Dr. Grant's desk shows a newspaper clipping, proclaiming his triumphant discovery with that exact term in the headline.

Dr. Grant eventually figures out that a real velociraptor is on the loose and eating people, dogs, cats, and anything else that looks appetizing to it. How does no one else figure this out? Well, the title makes that obvious. The raptor isn't just a resurrected dinosaur. It's also been made invisible by a team of scientists, led by a character played by Sean Astin.

What's the good joke here? It's the raptor itself or, more to the point, the absence of a dinosaur. It's easy to laugh at the incompetent, unconvincing visual effects in a low-budget project like this, so there's something even funnier about the filmmakers acknowledging their movie is such a low-budget affair that it can't even afford to have the one effect that matters in it.

Okay, the idea of the joke is cleverer than the gag itself, which just results in various characters being dragged off-screen, actors having limbs digitally removed with lots of computer-generated blood, and headless dummies spurting plenty of the red stuff. A lot of it goes a little way, which is also what can be said of most of the characters here.

Dr. Grant is joined by Denny (David Shackelford), the head of the park's security whose traumatic pantsing as a child is drawn out to its logical end, and Amber (Caitlin McHugh), his former flame who eventually believes him when the raptor attacks her in the bath. By the way, she has a kid, whom Dr. Grant assumes is his, and the payoff to his suspicions is casually cruel but actually feels like the sort of joke one might have gotten during the heyday of genre parodies.

There are bright spots here, in other words, but mostly, it's just jokes about giant piles of dinosaur feces, as well as what or who they once were, and semen and more poop and the debate over whether or not the raptor is capable of penetrating someone in a dinosaur costume. Generally, one laughs or doesn't at such jokes. In this instance, one could laugh the first three or four times at one joke, only to have stopped laughing long before the 15th instance of it.

The effort here is admirable, if only because the filmmakers know their limited ambitions and embrace them fully. The Invisible Raptor, though, is far too limited in its comedy to go on (and on) as long as it does.

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