RAPTOR

I don’t know how many people go through this particular stage in their lives, but there was period of time in my early twenties when the best thing in the world was gathering a few friends around to watch the worst possible movie.

There has to be something about being that specific age – like how 22-year-olds will call a film a masterpiece, but if you’re older you hear that and think ‘okay, sure’ and then you watch it and it’s pretty good but you’ve seen better films because you’re a hundred years old and you’ve seen plenty of good films by this point and nothing astonishes you anymore.

So, I think there must be something about terrible movies that really tickles the brains of people who have just aged into that part of their life where they’ve seen enough good films to know what a bad film is, and they’ve developed enough of a critical understanding about cinema that they really know what an extra bad film is.

Around that age is the perfect time to watch shit like The Room and absolutely crack up. Raptor is a perfect movie to watch around the same time. When, say, you’re 39 you might have seen so many bad films by this point that watching another one is more of a chore than a delight. Also, most of those mates you used to have around to laugh along with you now have kids, and it’s harder to organize a marathon of Raptor, Silent Night Deadly Night 2 and the rollerblading epic Airborne.

Raptor is proper trash. Like PROPER trash. It’s crazy how bad this movie is. This is a Roger Corman mess, and it is cobbled together from old footage used in Corman’s earlier Carnosaur film series. If this movie had caught me at the right age, I am sure there would be lines from it that I would have quoted as in-jokes for years.

I would absolutely love to be in a movie this bad. That would be an actual dream for me to appear in a movie as positively garbage as this one. Eric Roberts gets to be in this and I bet he didn’t enjoy it as much as I would. The chance to deliver a bad line as a poorly dressed deputy in a movie about a lab that’s been making dinosaurs that look like puppets would make my life complete.

IF I WERE IN 'RAPTOR' I WOULD: DIE BUT REAPPEAR SEVERAL SCENES LATER AS A DIFFERENT CHARACTER AFTER THE GUY WHO WAS SUPPOSED TO PLAY THE LINE CHEF AT THE DINER CALLED IN SICK THAT DAY AND I WAS STILL HANGING AROUND THE SET