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Big budgets afford movies certain luxuries. Steven Spielberg would never have been able to craft the blockbuster masterpiece that is Jurassic Park without a healthy, studio-provided budget. Most filmmakers don’t have access to such resources though. They have to resort to being creative and working with what they’ve got. So, what do you do if you want to make a dinosaur movie but don’t really have any money for the dinosaurs? It’s simple, you make the dinosaur invisible. At least that was the solution put forth by director Mike Hermosa in his upcoming creature feature The Invisible Raptor.
For starters, yes, this is a real movie and not some sort of prank. It even has a real movie star in it in the form of Sean Astin, of Lord of the Rings and The Goonies fame. It notably does not have a visible dinosaur, but there is a raptor on the loose terrorizing an unsuspecting town. As silly as this all sounds, the movie currently boasts a perfect 100% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. So this seems to be of the delightly ridiculous variety, alongside stuff like The Velocipastor. Here’s a trailer to help set some expectations.
The trailer makes it clear that Hermosa gets a lot of mileage out of this gag. Now, it should be noted that the film only has six reviews counted on Rotten Tomatoes. That rating is all but assured to change at some point. Even so, this is the kind of movie that could easily go the way of schlock like Cocaine Shark, which is to say that it’s at best a cash grab looking to get in on a current trend. In this case, it seems like Hermosa and the rest of his team tried to make something with honest to God merit. The official synopsis for the film reads as follows:
“After a top-secret experiment goes wrong, a hyper-intelligent invisible raptor escapes the lab and begins wreaking havoc in the surrounding neighborhood. When the creature’s identity is uncovered, it soon becomes clear that a disgraced paleontologist—alongside his ex-girlfriend, an unhinged amusement park security guard, and a local celebrity chicken farmer—is the town’s only hope for surviving the raptor’s ravenous rampage.”
The cast also includes Mike Capes, David Shackelford, Caitlin McHugh Stamos, Sandy Martin, Bobby Gilchrist and Richard Riehle.
“With a title like The Invisible Raptor, there’s a certain expectation and stigma that comes with it,” Capes, who also co-wrote the movie, said to Pop Culturalist. “We believe this movie will defy those expectations through our comedic tone and the incredible way our actors brought heart and likability to the story. It’s been wonderful to see people’s expectations blown away by a film about an invisible dinosaur. The love we put into making this really shines through.”
Here’s the thing. The Jurassic Park franchise is continuing with a seventh entry next year when Jurassic World Rebirth hits theaters. That can scratch a certain itch in the realm of dinosaur cinema. But dinosaurs are not owned IP. Anyone can make a dinosaur movie at any time. We could use more dinosaur movies! I, for one, applaud the ingenuity on display here and welcome more experimental silliness cut from this same cloth.
Look for The Invisible Raptor in theaters and on Digital on December 6. For more, check out the trailer for Dinobreak, an unofficial homage to ‘90s favorite Dino Crisis.
