Raptors: the second fiddle of the dinosaur orchestra.
(The third being the pterodactyls, btw)
Nothing beat the word “raptor” as a way to get your attention when scrolling through the channels in a boring saturday afternoon, or while searching trashy TV movies that just couldn’t come up with a weird or catchy title able to shoehorn a pun with “t-rex” or “dinosaur”, so “raptor [noun]” it is.
This also happens to be the “sequel” to another SyFy Channel mandated dino flick, Raptor Island, which we covered last year, so it’s no wonder it has alternative titles like Raptor Island 2: Planet Raptor, and shit like that, but it’s also unsurprising how sketchy are its claims of being a sequel to that other movie. It’s just part of the package to lie in this regard for this TV dino movies.
And it’s also “a sequel but not really” in the same way these usually are, with one or two actors from that previous one and it being shot in the same – kind of cheaper foreign country (this time the woods of Bulgaria take a rest so the Romanian ones can “swap in”), that’s all in terms of thing carried over, as the director is different (this time at the helm we have Gary Jones, of Mosquito, Spiders and some episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess fame) and the plots don’t really connect.
They loosely could, like maybe via some tortured repurposing of stock footage from the older movie and some cheap writing, but don’t, as here we’re in the distant but not so far away future of 2066, where the raptors (and some other dinosaurs) didn’t die out, but survived and expanded through the galaxy, putting humanity in a corner, with our last hope residing on a group of soldiers..
There’s no mention of the mercs, terrorists and the radioactive volcano of Raptor Island, nor any character from that movie returns or any event it’s even vaguely mentioned or matters here.
Thankfully this time we have Ted Raimi enlisted in the “not-EDF” (NOT- EDF! NOT E D F! NOT E D F!, etc) as a sci-fi doctor guy, not that he can do much to undo “death by CG velociraptor”.
The practical props and puppets for the raptors (and for the other aliens that do appear in the movie) aren’t 100 % awful, but the CG for the dinosaurs might even be worse – at least on par – with Raptor Island, and the bonus allosaurus does very little to give it some extra points, since they immediatly manage to bloop it up, to no one’s surprise.
It’s a bit odd to see these cheap sci-fi marines and sci-fi scientists move in a scenario that would fit better for a horror movie set in medieval Europe, but it’s one i fully welcome for the sake of variety, same goes for how they decided to shoot the opening scene in a very old looking Romanian village, very useful for the still non-humanoid alien raptors, that or the dinosaurs (or the bug-like aliens that came before the dinos) were shooting a medieval epic themselves with some vaguely Lovecraftian-esque sculpture showing up in this castle from the middle ages.
Seriously, the castle it’s the best part of the frigging movie, as it’s something a bit different for one of these sci-fi dinosaurs movies, though the rest it’s braindead as it comes, from the unlikeable stereotypes of “Mengel-esque scientist and meathead jocks soldiers”, whose IQ can be summed up by one of the soldiers using an unknown alien device that they don’t know what it does… as in lobbing it like a grenade against a raptor. And it somehow it “safely explodes” in range.
That, the passable/ok physical props for the creatures and Ted Raimi help, as does the fact that this is simply better directed than Raptor Island, not high praise in itself, but it is, the plot makes a little more sense as thing goes on, instead of the opposite (though don’t expect any kind of “raptor lore” or any real worldbuilding that makes any kind of sense if you think about for more than a second).
It’s still below sub-par dino crap, but it’s definitely a lot less boring and far more tolerable than its “prequel”.
Wise Cafe (International) 