Raptor Ranch (2013)

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long

Company: Nu Image

Runtime: 88 mins

Format: Imported DVD

Plot: A modern day small Texas community is overrun by vicious prehistoric Carnosaurs and a group of people try to survive the onslaught at a cattle ranch.

Review: I know I said on the Facebook page that I was taking a couple months break from working on the blog over the winter, like I usually do this time every year, but that was before I got my hands on a little diddy I've been wanting to check out for years, Raptor Ranch (also being referred to as Jurassic Dark: Raptor Ranch in some places of the Internet). So consider this a break frommy break, to bring you this Raptor Ranch review.

But first, a little bit of a backstory. I've always loved dinosaur movies, and I especially love dinosaur horror movies, so it goes without saying that the Carnosaur trilogy is one of my all-time top favorite B-Movie series'. Ever since I watched those three for the first time, I've been on the lookout for a great Carnosaur 4-in-spirit movie, one that while isn't technically Carnosaur 4, I could still view it as such in my head. There have been many Potentials over the years, movies like Raptor, which was made by the same people and made up almost entirely of stock footage from Carnosaur 1-3, or The Eden Formula which also used a bit of Carnosaur stock footage. More recently there's even been the found footage Area 407 or the 2013 Asylum 'summer blockbuster' Age of Dinosaurs that while arn't connected to the Carnosaur trilogy at all, are still great Potentials and each of those movies all had me viewing them at some point or another as a 'Carnosaur sequel-in-spirit'.

I can't remember the exact year, but I think it was somewhere in the 2003-2005 range, I started seeing news stories on an upcoming dinosaur horror flick called Raptor Ranch and I was even able to view Production Photos and Movie Stills on the film's own website. I saw it was shot and takes place in a small middle-of-nowhere desert town in Texas (Hey, just like Carnosaur!), I saw that the dinosaurs (at least partially) were done with practical models and props (Hey, just like Carnosaur!) that actually looked pretty reminiscent of the dinosaurs from Carnosaur and even had green-tinted POV shots from the dinosaurs (Hey, just like Carnosaur!), and it seemed to have a pretty dark and gloomy atmosphere from what I could tell (Hey, just like Carnosaur!). Suffice to say, I was uber-excited for this one and kept a very close eye on it. But then it just vanished. All news on it stopped coming out, the website went down, and even the imdb board for it went dead. I kept checking back in with Google on the project at random points over the years, hoping that some new article or website would give even a tiny morsel on what happened with this awesome-looking dinosaur horror movie, but I always came up with nada. Indiana Jones even had better luck tracking down ancient lost biblical artifacts then I did on turning up any mention of this movie or what might have happened to it. That is, until late last year/early this year, I saw it briefly mentioned in an article on Shock Till You Drop about a few upcoming B-Movies of 2013 in which Raptor Ranch was ever-so-briefly mentioned. A blink and you'd miss it namedrop. But it was something. And something, no matter how small, was the most I had gotten on this project in years. Not only that, but it mentioned a 2013 release! This year! Over the year more and more news on the movie started pouring out again – more photos, a plot synopsis, and even a brand new trailer. Yeah, I was pretty damn excited. 

Now here it is, the end of 2013, and technically Raptor Ranch still isn't being released over here in Canada or the U.S., but it has certainly played at some movie festivals and it does have a home video DVD release in other parts of the world in early December, so the day has finally come where I get to sit down and watch this potential Carnosaur 4-in-spirit dinosaur horror movie that I've been waiting all this time for!

Really, I pretty much only have myself to blame that I didn't enjoy it as much as I expected to. Don't get me wrong, I didn't totally dislike it, but it was nowhere near the level worthy of anticipation that I had set myself up for over the years. Right from the opening moments I was kind of doubting if I'd enjoy this as much as I had hoped I would. You see, the movie opens on a woman sitting in the woods getting stalked and killed by a Raptor, with a Tyrannosaurus Rex randomly walking down the street nearby, complete with music filled with attempted tension. The scene could have worked, but any attempt at genuine tension was ruined by a very annoying and out-of-place narration monologue from the main character of the movie that instantly takes you out of the moment of the scene, plus it doesn't even seem like the audio from her narration was mixed in with the audio from the scene very well either, more often clashing with it and being difficult to hear either audio tracks.

This would be a problem that would go on to plaque the majority of the rest of the movie. Not the audio clashing so much as just what that issue represented – a pretty disjointed movie that just did not seem to flow naturally at all. The entire thing actually felt like an amalgamation of multiple different cuts and reshoots of the same movie. Not sure if that's actually the case, but considering that it took the better part of a decade to be released from it's initial production, I wouldn't be surprised if that was at least partially true. Certainly, it didn't help either that the movie failed to even let you know when a scene was taking place in another location, until after the fact. This was most present in the beginning portion of the movie when it was setting up all the characters: We have the main town that the movie takes place in, this middle-of-nowhere Texan town, of which our main lead lives in, hates, and wants to leave ASAP. Than we have a trio of college kids on a roadtrip to a ski resort somewhere to have fun and get laid (cause nothing says getting laid like being buried in bundles of thick winter gear), and then we have a gay low quality pimp-wannabe/singer and his two young hot ladies that are on a trip to L.A., and the way the movie sets all these groups of people up, and the way their individual introduction locations look, you'd think they all started out in the same town and it's not until they end up all converging in that town later into the movie that I realized that it was all separate locations and towns that these characters and their subplots started out in. The only exception to that was the two FBI characters (one of which is played by B-Movie familiar Lorenzo Lamas, who has gone up against dinosaurs before in the unrelated Raptor Island) that leave the big city (which does get a subtitle indicating where it's to, even though that's the one location that actually already looked different anyway and was easily assumed to be a different place) to go investigate a series of mysterious deaths in this small town. 

There's also weird scene cuts that only work to confuse the viewer, such as this one part where it directly cuts from them running out of a store away from the dinosaurs in the middle of downtown with the power out at night, right to them running through the desert to an abandoned factory during the middle of the day but acting as if it was just a couple minutes later for them. Like I said at the top, stuff like that makes the movie feel very disjointed and like a mish-mash of various different final cuts and reshoots that maybe shouldn't have been edited together in the way they were.

As for the actors portraying these human characters, they covered all the levels of the acting ladder here, some being actually pretty good and enjoyable (like leading lady Jana Mashonee, who actually has never been in any other movie or show according to IMDB), all the way down to just downright painful to watch (most of the others), with a couple of the really bad ones coming across like they were stoned and high while filming. Lorenzo Lamas is passable enough, but he has next to nothing to do since he's missing from most of the movie. He comes across in the first 20 minutes like he's going to be a main character, but then he just drops out of the movie altogether and pops back up at the very end again, having absolutely no impact on anything, which just adds to the uneven disjointed feel I mentioned previously. It's not just the actors' faults though, because quite frankly, they weren’t given a whole lot to work with. The characters they have to play – every single one - are underwritten and just plain unlikable, and none of them actually seem to have been written to act like how real people act. None of them are all that surprised when they find out they're dealing with living dinosaurs, and even after everything starts happening, hardly any of the characters ever even take the whole situation seriously much.

As for the effects work on the dinosaurs, we got both CGI models and practical work, and they tend to range from surprisingly good to really really bad, depending on the scene. For the physical puppets and models, I actually wish we saw more, since they were mostly only used for really quick shots, but what we do get of them I thought looked great (and I kept pausing and doing frame-by-frame looks at them as often as I could). I would understand using them only for quick shots if they work on them wasn't that great, but considering the level of detail in them and how great they ended up looking, I'm surprised we weren’t given longer and better looks at them, especially when it comes to that amazingly well-made T. Rex head model - THAT was the stuff of a Carnosaur movie right there! The CGI models though is where things wavered. Luckily most of the time they too looked surprisingly great for such a low budget affair, but there were scenes and shots scattered throughout where they did not look anywhere near on-par with the rest of the movie. Over all though, I was more impressed then let down. 

I did not care, however, for showing a Raptor and a Rex in their full glory right off the bat within the first 10 seconds of the movie. It felt forced, unneeded, and without that scene the movie would have had an excellently-paced build-up to the reveal of the dinosaurs later in the movie. What they should have done was just give us a quick glimpse of an outline of...something...mysterious in the woods, and then the couple roars in the distance that we get at one point, and then that should have been it until the dinosaurs are let loose later in the movie. Sometimes it's the little changes that can make the big differences in the end.

Now, with some of those things out of the way, including everything that makes up the disappointment I felt at times throughout...this movie is FUN. Perfect? Hell no, very far from it as I've already covered, to the point where parts in that first half of the movie are almost unwatchable, depending on the scene. But despite all those issues the movie still ultimately manages to be fun as hell, thanks in large part to it's Carnosaur-style dinosaur carnage filling up the second half. We have Raptors stalking their prey in the dark, a Rex's head coming down through the roof of a house to eat someone and bursting through the walls to get to the others within, a Raptor breaking into a gas station's outhouse to get to the person using it, Raptors sneaking into the tour bus to get to two teens having sex, and later a Rex going all Jurassic Park on the bus by knocking it over, then upside down, and banging it around as it tries to get to the survivors inside, in addition to a very nice scene of two Rexes stalking the characters through a forest. And that stuff is only a small sample of the dino carnage on display here, culminating in a pretty awesome fight between two Raptors, two Rexes, and a Megalosaurus. Oh, and also toss in a tough badass lead chick with a crossbow as a weapon to fight against the dinosaurs. Once the movie truly kicks into high gear for it's second half, there's not a dull moment to be found, and plenty of action and gore in every single scene.

There's still one aspect I'm still not quite clear on though, and that's the subplot of one of the Raptors being loose all along. There was a Raptor that killed the misses in the beginning, that then started stalking the teens as they appeared in the town, but the movie never explained anything about that. There was never any mention of a dinosaur having escaped before that, nor any mention by the guy who was creating them being worried about one having escaped, and other than the intro scene the escaped Raptor didn't really do anything at all, so I'm not really sure what the deal was with that. The movie also never explains why or more importantly how the guy created the dinosaurs, just that he has. Which I suppose, for me viewing this as a Carnosaur 4-in-spirit movie, actually works kind of good cause I can just assume the guy found some leftover Carnosaur eggs from one of those movies – ha! Actually, speaking of the Carnosaur movies, I got a tad bit giddy when one of the characters names off the dinosaurs and say they're from the 'Carnosaur family'. I know that's actually a real thing, but seeing as how much I'm jonsing for comparing this to the Carnosaur movie series, that was the nice little sweet cherry on top for me. Although for a movie called Raptor Ranch, the Raptors themselves aren’t even really in the movie much - it's mostly just the two Rexes and the Megolosaurus that are the main dinosaurs here, and considering that the characters even say right in the movie that they're of the Carnosaur family, I'm not sure why the movie wasn't just named Carnosaur Ranch and be done with it. Not only would I have liked that Carnosaur connection in the name, but it also would have been more accurate since the dinosaurs of the Carnosaur family make up a hell of a lot more screentime then the Raptors do.

The movie also fully embraces the camp instead of trying to pretend it's not there like so many of these movies do, and at times it actually comes across like more of a comedy than I was expecting. I was expecting a dark, gritty, serious dinosaur horror movie along the likes of the Carnosaur flicks and while we do get quite a bit of that, there was equally as much of it that was played for laughs, including not one death-by-being-stepped-on, but two. I'm not saying the comedy wasn't fun, nor am I holding it against the movie, it just wasn't what I was expecting going into the movie is all.

In short, the flow of Raptor Ranch felt very disjointed and lots of the poor editing made some aspects confusing to watch, plus the acting really doesn't help much either and most of the characters are unlikable and don't even act like real people, making the first half of the movie honestly a bit hard to sit through at times. However, once the dinosaur action really kicks into high gear around the halfway mark, the movie throws enough blood, gore, screams, and dinosaur attack scenes our way that you quickly forget about most of that other stuff because it's so much fun to watch, although some of the questionable editing certainly takes you out of the moment quite a few times. I do, however, love that almost all of it took place during the nighttime. So many B-Movies these days take place entirely during bright day scenes, I often find myself longing for the B-Movies of old, where they actually liked taking place in the dark and using that kind of atmosphere to its advantage, and I loved that this movie brought that back.

Even though the finished product is quite uneven and at times frustrating even, if there ever was to be a Carnosaur 4 made now-adays, I would actually really like for it to be along the lines of this movie, just with a bit stronger of a first half, as I felt this movie was quite a decent Carnosaur 4-in-spirit attempt that I can easily see myself adding to my annual Carnosaur series re-watch and just pretending it's part of that series. Now if we could just get a Region 1 DVD or Region A BluRay release for Raptor Ranch, I'll be set for that.

5/10 rooms in the Psych Ward

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Operation Delta Force (1997)

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long

Company:  Nu Image

Runtime: 93 mins

Format: DVD

Plot: A team of military soldiers and a scientist go after a terrorist group that has seized a deadly virus and is threatening to release it upon populated areas.

Review: The plot for Operation Delta Force (a title trying to capitalize on the then-recent Chuck Norris-starring Delta Force) is a simple one we've seen dozens of times before, in dozens of other made-for-TV action movies - When Ernie Hudson fails to protect a deadly new manmade virus from being stolen by a rogue group of soldiers, Jeff Fahey's special ops Delta Squad is called in to work with him to retrieve the virus and kill the bad guys before they can unleash it upon the world. Of course, just like how things always go in movies such as this, Ernie Hudson and Jeff Fahey's characters have bad history between each other, which leads to lots of badly-scripted drama and unwillingness to work together.

This movie's only real strong suit is in the acting, which is to be expected with these great names attached. Jeff Fahey rocks the hell out of this movie, and Ernie Hudson always turns in a serviceable and entertaining performance. The real surprise though is that even the less main and background characters pull off some decent to good performances, and all the characters on the main Delta Squad team have pretty good chemistry with one another.

However all the action is horribly shot, and in the most boring least engaging ways possible - most of the time they don't even show the guns going off, just really close-up shots of the people's upper bodies, or really far-away shots with badly-integrated gun sound effects going off.

Likewise, the script had to be the most run of the mill cardboard-cutout boring action script that was going around the studios at the time, filled with huge overdone cliche' after huge overdone cliche', and not in the fun cheesy 'we're making fun of these things!' tongue-in-cheek way, no, it was in the 'oh man, these things rock, we are so smart!' totally oblivious kind of way. It also didn't help that the music was constantly way over-dramatic and almost never fit the scenes that it was playing in.

I would not go out of my way to see this movie, and I probably wouldn't even watch much of it if I came across it on TV at some point, but if you see that it's on TV some late night, it may be worth watching a little bit of, just for the fun performances. And hey, if you got some beer in the fridge, you might even want to stick it out all the way through and make a fun drinking game out of all the action movie cliche's they over-use and beat you over the head with. Of course, you'll have alcohol poisoning by the end of it, but it may just be worth it in order to get through all of this first movie in the Operation Delta Force series.

Yes, I said series. Apparently there's 5 or 6 sequels to this. God help us all...

2/10 rooms in the Psych Ward

 

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Spiders (2013)

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long

COMPANY: Nu Image

RUNTIME: 90 mins

FORMAT: BluRay

PLOT: After a Soviet space station crashes into a New York City subway tunnel, a new species of dangerous venomous spiders is discovered, and soon they start mutating to gigantic proportions and wreak havoc on the city.

REVIEW: When Spiders (Spiders 3D for its limited theatrical run) was first announced and we started getting news of it here and there, I was a bit confused as to what kind of movie it was - remake, sequel, or something original? See, back in 2000 and 2001 there were a couple SyFy Channel style B-Movies also titled Spiders and Spiders II: Breeding Grounds. Like this one, they also dealt with genetically-modified mutant killer spiders brought down on something crashing from space, and they too began growing to immense size during the films. I had no idea initially if this was supposed to be a new sequel to that series (with the 3 in 3D being the number of the movie), a remake to the first, or just a brand new movie with the same unimaginative title and an almost exact same plot. Well it turns out it's that last one, and while that was slightly disappointing to me at first, in the end I completely forgot all about any other similar movies because this one was just so damn good.

As far as expectations for low budget cheesy B-Movies go, this one surpassed them in pretty much every regard. The acting is actually pretty good from everyone, no matter how minor or major the role, and when you take into account just how many Unknowns and B-Movie actors are in this, that's quite the feat - even the child actor didn't bother me at all here and came across as very natural. Also, Patrick Muldoon (here playing subway tracks manager and loving father that has to find his family amidst the spider-caused chaos in the city) has clearly discovered the Fountain of Youth as he hasn't aged a single day since his time on the original Starship Troopers, and he's equally a joy to watch here as he was in that classic.

The special effects of the mutant spiders ranged from ok to great and were always well-above average for what you would expect from such a movie. From the normal-sized little critters that plagued the subway tracks and other dimly-lit locations, to the dog-sized buggers that ran up the sides of the buildings and chased people through warehouses, to the car-sized horrors that occupied the mostly-deserted streets and back alleys, to the gigantic building-sized monstrosity that created mass chaos and destruction across the city, they all looked pretty excellent and the CGI models for them interacted with the physical world almost flawlessly. As a hated of any kind of arachnids, I can assure you that the CGI models in this movie will be giving me nightmares for weeks to come. Likewise, the set designs were excellent as well and actually looked realistic. Even though the movie was filmed in Romania or Bucharest or some place like that, I never once questioned if this was actually NYC I was seeing as it looked pretty spot-on to me. If I hadn't read in another article where this movie had been filmed, I would have never guessed that it hadn't been in New York City.

It's also a nice added bonus that the majority of the movie takes place at night or in dimly-lit shadowed areas, which is something I miss from 80's and 90's B-Movies that seems to not happen much anymore, if at all - so many B-Movies today (especially SyFy Channel ones) take place entirely during the day, and they loose such great potential for atmosphere by doing that (not to mention it helps mask any terrible CGI a bit). Even having a couple night time attack scenes go a long way, so it was a nice surprise when this one was filled with them. Hell, even the main plot of the movie (that being the spiders coming down from space and infesting New York City) happens within the first 5-10 minutes, which was another welcomed change as so many of these kinds of movies take so long to get to the point, but here it starts almost right away and wastes no time.

However, where it does waste time, is with the Government Conspiracy subplot. See, there's this rather large section of the movie devoted to the Government evacuated the city and quarantining sections of it off, threatening those that try to cross by way of on-the-spot execution. In addition to this going on, the Government is also employing very Mission: Impossible style tactics to 'get rid of' (I.E. murder) anyone with real knowledge on the reason the city is being evacuated, that being due to giant mutating alien spiders. On paper I'm sure it looked great, and even in-action it's not the idea of it that I don't like, it's just that far too much time is spent on it, and spent on characters within it that have no bearing on anything else in the movie, and I feel it kind of takes you out of the main meat of fun far more often then not. It brings down an otherwise perfect flow to the movie and that whole subplot could easily have been shortened down or cut out all together and the movie would have been better off for it.

Along those lines there's an extension of that subplot, dealing with a Government scientist and the lead military general doing tests on a captured spider that involves some revelations, that while I didn't mind nearly as much as the previously-mentioned stuff, I still could have done without. I say it all too often, but that's only because these movies do it all too often, but I really hate it when killer animal B-movies feel the need to throw in human villains, as I find it takes some of the threat away from the killer animals, plus nobody tunes into a giant mutated killer alien spider movie to watch a couple questionable humans make some bad decisions and act all tough about it. Don't get me wrong, I liked having the military involved, especially for some of those awesome and fun military vs giant spiders action scenes, but it's just having the lead General and scientist kind of being the obligatory 'evil military general' and 'mad scientist' characters that I could have done without. However, it at least it gave us a couple more main characters to focus on, and they did impact other parts of the movie as well as interacted with our main leads on occasion, so at least they have a good reason to be here, unlike the whole Government cover-up stuff that I mentioned earlier.

Those quibbles aside, this is a near-perfect B-Movie and it's a hell of a lot of fun. I just wish they would have come up with a better, more interesting title then simply 'Spiders'. Especially since there's already an almost identical movie about mutated alien spiders getting loose after escaping a falling man-made outer space object and growing to giant size, ALSO with the exact same generic title of 'Spiders' that was released back in 2000. But whatevs. Nobody probably even remembers that movie other than me anyway.

As for this one, I have no idea why it never got a wider theatrical release then it did. As far as I'm concerned, the acting, CGI effects, and even the movie as a whole is at least on-par with, if not better than, Eight Legged Freaks which did get a theatrical release back in 2002, and in my opinion, this one deserved a far better release treatment then it ultimately got.

8/10  rooms in the Psych Ward

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