Hardcore
badass Sgt. Hackett (Lorenzo Lamas) has had enough! He
and his fellow hardcore Navy Seals are about to embark on a
mission to set some NATO peace keepers free, and if time
allows, completely murder the international terrorist known as
Azir (Steven Bauer). Yes, after listening to Sgt.
Hackett's pep talk to his Seal Team of Six it does looks as if
he's trying to get them pumped up to go to an eight year old's
piano recital, but I'm guessing that Sgt. Hackett believes
fiery rhetoric to be overrated. These guys are
professionals, right? Besides, they're all gonna end up
on 'Raptor Island' anyway and be dead real soon, so that
would've been a rah-rah speech all wasted and stuff.
So our seals track down Aziz and his Bulgarian henchman to
some boat, they try to rescue the pretty lady Jamie (Hayley
DuMond), but they suck at rescuing people. In fact, as
the day goes on, we will find that this brand of Navy Seal
isn't really shining a bright light on the SEAL training
process. Eventually the terrorists and the sailors land
on a little out of the way atoll, but one with a little
surprise. And Jamie is actually an undercover CIA
operative. Hackett knew this right away as she handled
an M16 like it was an old friend. If you were to ask us,
it looked like she hadn't seen that friend in an awful long
time.
Now why are there poorly animated CGI raptor dinosaurs on this
island? That's a darn good question. In the film's
opening scene we got to see a toy plane carrying a box labeled
Radioactive Goo, or something like that, and it crashed.
That was 40 years ago. Anything else after that I
believe is left to your own imagination as I think that's all
you're gonna get in relation to why there are dinosaurs on
Raptor Island.
Here's how
this works: Dinosaurs see Seals in Raptor Vision, Seals
see dinosaurs and look amazed, Dino's and Seal's stare at each
other for a while, Seals shoot at dinosaurs, CGI paintball
squibs explode on dinosaurs, dinosaurs either stand there and
take it, or they attack, or they topple over. Depending
on the situation. Repeat. In between walk in the
woods a lot.
Oh… the terrorist. If ever there was an afterthought in
a movie its Steven Bauer's version of the terrorist
Aziz. You sit around watching this crap movie, and
usually you've completely forgotten about Aziz, completely
blanked that he's still on the island, but then he'll pop up
and remind us with that gawdawful accent of his. I think he was channeling something from
the Middle East with that accent, but it was more like a
deeper voiced version of the cartoon rat Speedy Gonzalez that
he actually landed on. Awful.
The situation for our heroes is not a good one, or for the
audience for that matter. Actually, now that I think
about it, the situation isn't all that bad. I mean the
raptor's and that bigger dino are trapped on the island, the
international terrorist is trapped on the island, and our only
concern would be if the hero and his chick sidekick can get
off the island, but we're not concerned about that because we
don't care about them. Everything is fine. Plus
Hackett has ignited a volcano, which seemed like a good idea
at the time, because it's going to wipe out the raptors, who
weren't really bothering anybody to be honest with you, but in
retrospect it's an awful idea because apparently raptors can
swim. Which will lead to a sequel. And thus we
have a special place in hell reserved for super badass Sgt.
Hackett.
My well publicized quest, of course, is to watch every Sci-Fi
original movie ever made, which looks like it's going to get a
lot easier since SyFy has drastically peeled back their
purchasing of these things in 2013, which should make the
world a better place, but still makes us infinitely sad.
That being said, this is one I've been pushing back to the
rear. I'd seen it when it came out nearly ten years ago,
before I started doing this thing I do, and as such I had no
desire to revisit it. Ever. But it had to be
done. There. It's done.
What makes Raptor Island one of the, if not the worst Sci-Fi
original ever? The easiest place to start is with the
raptors themselves. They look awful. Just
awful. And since the movie is called 'Raptor Island',
that would be an issue. The acting was as bad as you
would think as most of the actors did give it their best
shots, but my man Lorenzo looked like if he could've been
somewhere else, he would've been. And I could've been
spared the deep scene of Hackett and Jamie discussing why they
joined the service. It was pretty much the only
melodrama in the film, but only served to make a terrible
movie worse.
Was there any magic? Why yes there was. The scene
where hardcore SEAL Quinn (Hristo Shopov) played tragic hero
and told Hackett and Jamie to escape while he held off the
raptors. Quinn proceeded to shoot at trees, totally
missing the raptors, and then got eaten and didn't slow the
raptor's down, not even a little bit. Quinn sucks at
being a tragic hero. Somewhat magical was the verbal
showdown between Jamie and Aziz, only because Jamie would
never shut up and it looked like that was getting on Stephen
Bauer's nerves for real.
'Raptor Island'… at least that's out of the way. But
dang, 'Planet Raptor' still awaits, menacingly standing by to
torture us further.
