FrightFest Glasgow review – The Invisible Raptor
It’s an odd paradox that you can make a cheap movie with almost no originality in the plot or villains and scrape by – how many semi-entertaining FrightFest selections have featured masked home invaders or sacrifice-happy folk horror cults? But if you do something more unusual which happens to have been done once before, then you get called out on it. Perfect Skin (2018), a solid FrightFest entry, had exactly the same premise as a forgotten Bruce Dern movie from the early 80s called Tattoo. The Invisible Raptor is the world’s second invisible dinosaur movie – daring to tread in the clawed footprints of the 1964 classic Sound of Horror (aka El Sonido Prehistorico), which also had Ingrid Pitt dancing in Capri pants (this has a micro-cameo from Sean Astin, which just isn’t the same). The lunatic notion of Sound of Horror is that its revived dinosaur blends in with the background like a chameleon – which is a kind of invisibility – whereas this one is genetically engineered that way … in an amusing gabble of exposition, a scientist explains ‘did you see Jurassic Park? We did that’ then is cut off after ‘did you see The Invisible Man’ by someone who doesn’t want spoilers. Of course, the motive shared by the makers of Sound of Horror and The Invisible Raptor (director – Mike Hermosa, star/writer Mike Capes, writer Johnny Wickham) is that invisible dinosaurs are less of a strain on the effects budget, though on both cases they turn semi-visible for a climax (here, the monster is outlined after being doused with urine).
The setting is Spielburgh County, home to an unethical genetic engineering weapons lab and a cheery cheap Dinoworld attraction – in a plot which parallels FrightFest selection Claw (2021), the raptor – which can read and is dextrous with its invisible claws – escapes and starts killing off mostly comic bit-players. The unlikely hero is Dr Grant Walker (Capes), tour guide at Dinoworld, whose pathetic sidekick Denny (David Shackelford, also in True Detective Night Country – though they can’t have seen him in this before they cast him in that unless Issa Lopez is grateful enough to operate a ‘well, if he’s good enough for FrightFest …’ policy) wears a Barney suit and has a longstanding series of grudges against people he’d like to see get eaten (a little of Denny goes a long way – and there’s a running joke about his tiny dick). A kid called Kintner gets eaten and turned into a big pile of raptor shit, Grant gets re-involved with an old girlfriend (Grace Demarco) and an eccentric old chicken farmer (you-know-the-face Sandy Martin) helps out on the dino-hunt. At 113 minutes, it’s mercilessly overlong for this sort of romp – and we’ll all have notes about what could profitably have been cut – but Capes has a skewed charm and it cheerfully embraces its own stupidity. Maybe the third invisible dinosaur film will be a stone classic.
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