Déjà vu
There have been reports of a bunch of vicious animal attacks. Sheriff Jim Tanner Eric Roberts teams up with an animal control officer Barbara Phillips (Melissa Brasselle) to figure out what is going on. Unbeknownst to them Dr. Hyde (Corbin Bernsen), a former military researcher had been working on a cloning project involving dinosaurs. When the government funding for the project was cut, Hyde looked elsewhere. The Pentagon discovers Hyde obtained foreign backing to continue his experiments. That's bad enough but one of the mad doctor's experiments escapes. The giant T-Rex is now running rampant killing people. The government sends troops in the mop it up.
“Raptor” was released in 2001 and was directed by Jim Wynorski. It is the fourth dinosaur movie produced by Roger Corman and is part of the Carnosaur series. As such it did use dinosaur footage from the three previous movies. Actually it used a lot of footage. “The Eden Formula” also uses footage from “Carnosaur” and “Carnosaur 3” due to the fact that the director and writer for “Eden Formula”, John Carl Buechler, also worked on the special effects team for Carnosaur one and three. Since we are talking about the same dinosaur puppets in all these movies the story becomes more important than it normally would. This one is OK I guess.
Eric Roberts is in good form but Corbin Bernson provides an over the top performance as the mad scientist du jour. I can't explain the beret. Perhaps his character is an artist at heart.
Normally when Roger does one of his cut and paste movies he at least buys the rights to someone else's good work before he slices and dices. In Raptor, however, Roger Corman is ripping off Roger Corman. What we see is what happens when you take several bad movies and splice them all together. T-Rexenstein. I wonder how it would have turned out if they had not broken the jar with the normal brain in it.
Oh yes, there is a helicopter taken down by a raptor. (I believe that was from Carnosaur 2.) Unless you have short term memory loss than there will be a lot of things in this movie that look really familiar.
The Special Services guys are rip roarin’ and sufficiently macho, however, they are no match for a bunch of raptors. Add to the mix a T-Rex. Why? Because they have footage from prior movies that they want to re-use so this move has raptors and a T-Rex.
The only reason to want this film is to round out your Carnosaur collection or if you are a die hard fan of either Eric Roberts or Corbin Bernson.
Lot of “F” bombs and such for you parents out there. There are a couple versions of the movie available. One is about 81 minutes long and another is about 89 minutes long. The main difference between the two is that the longer version has an 8 minute sex scene about fourteen minutes into the film. Somehow there is also a 93 minute version out there as well. The 93 minute version is the only one I could find.