Comedy

The Invisible Raptor (2023)

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What kills so many monster movies today is cheap CGI. The further down a film sits from that line item on a Steven Spielberg production, the less convincing the creature. In the low-budget world, the effects can be so bad, you wonder why anyone bothered, from the makers to the viewers.

The Invisible Raptor gets around this by, well, making its titular dinosaur unseen. For a good chunk of the pic, the prehistoric beast is represented by a Mylar helium balloon tugged by its string. Because Mike Hermosa’s movie is an out-and-out comedy, that trick works — like the proverbial charm, actually.

Escaping from the lab that created it, the indiscernible apex predator embarks a killing spree. Only downtrodden paleontologist Dr. Grant Walker (Bachelor Party Massacre’s Mike Capes) recognizes the carnage as the works of a raptor. He also recognizes a chance at redemption from his humiliating daily job: teaching kids about fossilized feces at a dino theme park. And, in the process, if he can win back the heart of his former girlfriend (Caitlin McHugh Stamos, Random Tropical Paradise), newly divorced, that’s a bonus.

I was fully prepared to abhor this based on title alone. Yet I wasn’t at all prepared for something so more-than-intermittently clever, it’s kind of ingenious. (Had Capes and co-writer Johnny Wickham stuck to one “butthole” joke, I doubt “kind of” would remain part of the previous sentence.)

Although not a true spoof, The Invisible Raptor is engineered as a gentle Jurassic Park parody steeped in reverence for other Spielberg milestones (Jaws, E.T., Gremlins) and popcorn actioners of the 1980s (Rambo, Predator, The Terminator, et al.). Thus, it’s no accident they recruited Goonies leader Sean Astin for an extended cameo and top billing.

You’ll quickly forget he’s in it because Raptor roars to life on the combined comedic strength of Capes, Stamos and David Shackleford (Vacancy 2: The First Cut) as the park’s redneck security guard. Oh, and some really dark, really funny gags at the expense of kids’ feelings and dead people. —Rod Lott

Get it on Amazon.

Documentary

Pay Dirt: The Story of Supercross (2024)

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Caveat emptor time, kids. The sports documentary Pay Dirt: The Story of Supercross should be subtitled Some Stories of Supercross in No Particular Order. After priming the pump with an adrenaline-edited prologue of defied gravity and severed spinal cords, Paul Taublieb’s feature goes into scattered mode, leaping from subject to subject like a dog who’s just had a dozen squeak toys thrown its way.

Want to know how the dirtbike arena competition started? Well, first, we watch a profile of Jimmy Button, a champion who bounced back from paralysis — inspiring, but wholly out of place; given its emotional weight, it arguably would work best at the other end. The whole movie is like that. With each title card rebooting the narrative starting line, the experience is like watching the full contents of a YouTube channel’s playlist.

In quick succession, Pay Dirt’s segments (really documentary shorts) surface-level examine a rivalry among two riders, the amateur kids’ competition at the Loretta Lynn Dude Ranch, another rivalry among two other riders, the dirt on the track, the sport’s version of stage parents, riders without factory sponsors and, buttering its own bread on both sides, Monster Energy’s current sponsorship of Supercross.

As an occasional casual viewer of the X Games and any Olympic event that irks old people, I’m open to this sort of thing. But an ESPN 30 for 30, this is not.

And not for lack of opportunity, as Pay Dirt absolutely chokes when it comes to the single most interesting story: Supercross creator Mike Goodwin being convicted for murdering former business partner Mickey Thompson and the man’s wife. From a prison phone, Goodwin recalls that he “was flabbergasted” and hoped he wouldn’t be blamed. What he doesn’t provide is a reason to believe him. In fact, Taublieb is so unconcerned with the crime, he gives it a minute.

I mean that literally: one minute. To a double homicide. Committed by the guy who started the sport you’re telling the “story” of. Adding insult to fatal injury, the narrator even botches the dead woman’s name as “Judy” instead of “Trudy.”

That narrator? Just one Josh Brolin, whose participation in a project far beneath his Oscar-nominated talents suggests either a big favor or a bet make-good. —Rod Lott

Opening Friday, Jan. 24.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Demolition Man (1993)

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Most of Southern California being on fire reminds me Demolition Man, but, of course, with different results. The movie begins with the Hollywood Hills on fire, a dire prophecy that has come to pass, sadly — especially since Sylvester Stallone is now an “emissary” to Hollywood by Donald Trump. (Truthfully, I didn’t see that coming, palling around with other has-beens like Mel Gibson and Jon Voight. Yeccccch!)

With hits like Rocky, Rambo, and Rhinestone, Stallone was one of the biggest actors in the world. However, Demolition Man is Stallone’s absolute triumph: a somewhat smart, pretty inventive sci-fi-action film with enough explosives and unmatched machismo to create a spandex-clad gumbo — in other words, one of 1993’s most underrated and unappreciated films!

In an alternate 1996, L.A. is a total war zone. Beefy cop Sgt. John Spartan (the beefy Stallone) goes into the inner city to take down terrorist mastermind Simon Phoenix (the fully engaging Wesley Snipes) and is penalized for his trouble: He is cryogenically frozen. Wowza!

In a future 2032, L.A. is renamed San Angeles, a utopian megalopolis with no violence, hunger or, apparently, working toilets. That all changes when Phoenix and Spartan are revived and compete in the world’s biggest dick contest. Of course, the peaceful members of society get murdered, killed and executed, all at the same time.

In between exhibitions at the MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum, artist Marco Brambilla directed the film. His swerves on the well-paved road between precise critiques of pop culture and disparate art culture serve the purpose to entertain.

And, really, it’s not that dumb. I can’t stress this enough!

The movie also casts the charming Sandra Bullock and the grating Denis Leary, and they serve their comical purposes. But, once again, the penile swagger of Stallone and Snipes create a dream team of ethical counterpoints, trading stereotypical non-PC lines and acts of brutality in a two-hour time frame.

In other words, it was a smart movie from stupid people. Right?

Demolition Man, with its end credits song by Sting — always a banger — is a fully satisfying film and one of Stallone’s last major works. Two years later, all that goodwill was tossed in the trash can with Judge Dredd and, well, we all know how that turned out. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

Pater Noster and the Mission of Light (2024)

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If Timothy Leary and Kenneth Anger made Midsommar … well, who the hell knows what that would turn out to resemble. But I reckon Pater Noster and the Mission of Light, “an underground film by Christopher Bickel,” comes closest in cosmic proximity. Nothing else need apply. 

Alt-AF record store worker Max (first-timer Adara Starr) comes across a vinyl title so scarce, it’s worth a grand: “It’s this weird hippie psych record. This commune put it out in the early ’70s. Rare as shit.” Acting on a tip, she finds a thick stack of four of their five LPs at a thrift store; the missing album, with a rumored five-copy pressing, is supposedly cursed. 

One mysterious phone call later, Max and four friends accept an invitation to visit the commune, Wunderlawn. It’s run by spiritual leader and titular alchemist Pater Noster (Mike Amason, Bickel’s Bad Girls). He’s the kind of unkempt wack job whose followers get hallucinogenic powder blown onto their faces — and, um, into other places.

The trippiness that follows is so immersive, it feels as if some particles of that substance may have blown through the screen and up your sinuses. That not everybody will make it out alive is a foregone conclusion; that you’re ill-prepared for how that all happens is nearly as certain.

Don’t let the initial High Fidelity in-store shenanigans fool you, much as the montage of customers’ stupid questions may try, but this is one wild occult pic. Shot in South Carolina for the price of a used car, Mission of Light finds Bickel carrying over Bad Girls’ propulsive energy, but now it aims squarely to shock. Once that starts happening, his performers’ acting deficits shrink.

The situations Max and friends find themselves in are unsettling enough; add the discomforting soundtrack and we’re pushed, if not shoved, into “Should we even be watching this?” territory — not in the negative “this sucks” way, but with the unshakable feeling that Bickle tapped into Genuine Evil to fuel the frames. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Bloodthirsty Crazy Spider (2021)

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When a new species of spider — your guess to its level of bloodthirstiness — is discovered in Chinese mountain caves, the news piques the interest of college student Qiumu (Zheng Zefei) who’s obsessed with exactly two things: spiders and boobs. He’s only seen one of those things, strictly judging from the Party City closeout web above Qiumu’s dorm room bed. 

Enlisting the help of a documentary filmmaker of the opposite sex (Zhangzhen), he quickly devises a mission: “Let’s go to find the spider.” (sic) They do go, and they do find. The latter is quite easy, on account of it being so large, the thing’s impervious to their swinging knapsacks. It’s also hairy, stabby-legged, big-bootied and, of course, computer-generated. 

As if an eight-legged freak of nature mutated by industrial toxic waste weren’t enough of an antagonist, the movie offers a human villain, too: Mr. Wang. Hey, someone needed to be the literal butt of the diarrhea jokes. Speaking of, as he’s grunting and grimacing on the toilet, the subtitles read, “Why is it so sticky?”

At minute 64, Bloodthirsty Crazy Spider calls it a day with a hard stop. No climax, no ending. Just a harsh rebuke that this is all your fault. You — yes, you — caused the massive creepy crawler by carelessly allowing your can of Juiced Monster Khaotic® to sink to the ocean floor, asshole. 

The creature feature makes good use of abandoned factories and poor use of everything else, particularly whatever program the Youku production company booted up to animate the arachnid. The software’s free trial period appears to have expired since said spider hardly looks fully rendered. When it skitters, viewers titter. —Rod Lott

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