Let’s get this over with.
The VelociPastor cut a fairly compelling trailer that promised a lot of over the top and stupid fun as we follow a priest who transforms into a velociraptor and fights crime. I mean, with that premise who cannot be interested?
The film delivers the stupidity. As we follow Doug Jones (Greg Cohan) after he witnesses his parents murder and travels to China only to be infected by a fang that gives him the curse of turning into a dinosaur. He befriends a prostitute Carol (Alyssa Kempinski) and saves her from a thug. She encourages him to use his powers to fight crime.
The movie could be a lot of stupid fun, but it ends up just being stupid. We get a lengthy training montage, a fast-forward recap of the whole film, and numerous other scenes that do nothing but drag out the running time. The opening credits make up about 5% of the film. You could say this was the point—that the whole film is designed to be obnoxious and a commentary on the nature of film construction. I would disagree, I think the good ideas (or at least fun ones) ran out and they needed to pad out the running time.
It is hard to criticize a film meant to be ridiculous for any technical issues as most seem intentional. I did laugh aloud at some moments, but mostly I found it to be boring. The jokes run a bit thin and we end up just waiting for it all to end.
Oddly, the film needed more bad dinosaur prosthetics and cheesy actions scenes. The dialogue is cringe-terrible, and this can only go so far before the laughs turn to banality.
I wish the film would have been better… or significantly worse. It rests on the not bad enough to be good, but not good enough to be good. I think it is bad enough to be bad. Cropping the film down to less than hour would make for a more digestible ridiculousness. Unfortunately, I imagine the need to get it to the 80 minutes was pressured by funders more than the needs of the story.
Folks looking for something terrible with a small side of awesome will enjoy it. However, you won’t remember much about it. There aren’t enough good one liners or moments to really stand out.
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