The Invisible Raptor Movie Review – This Velociraptor Horror Comedy Stinks More Than Dino-Poop

Mike Hermosa‘s The Invisible Raptor establishes itself as an ingenious concept. It bypasses the need for expensive special effects and animatronics by letting the audience’s mind do all the work. It’s what Hermosa describes as “a creature feature with no creature.” Unfortunately, that’s all this turns out to be: A concept that never fleshes itself out and struggles to hold the audience’s interest for a laborious 115 minutes.

The Invisible Raptor operates as both a riff and parody of Jurassic Park. Numerous scenes and lines call back to the 1993 Steven Spielberg classic as the movie wears its influences like a badge of honor. It posits a story where scientists take it one step further than creating an amusement park filled with dinosaurs. They tinker with an invisible raptor, because turning one of nature’s greatest predators into an unseeable force of nature sounds like a swell idea. What happens next? Oh, you know, a bloody rampage of terror that former paleontologist Dr. Grant Walker (Mike Capes) and his motley crew need to stop before this creature slaughters everyone.

The film is nothing more than a gimmick with terrible characters

Sounds like fun, right? Well, for maybe 30 to 45 minutes. Tops. The Invisible Raptor runs out of steam halfway through its second act and feels far too drawn out by the time the credits roll. Funny enough, the biggest fault lies in how the Mike Capes and Johnny Wickham-penned script tries to focus too much on the people and not enough on the dinosaur. Do they realize that no one cares about the human characters in Jurassic Park and everyone tunes in to see the dinos tear apart the idiotic people? Presumably not.

It also doesn’t help that Capes’ Grant, Caitlin McHugh Stamos’ Amber, and David Shackelford’s Denny are lousy main characters. Amber wanders around like a lovesick puppy, hoping to rekindle her romance with Grant, who is also about as narratively compelling as a boiled potato. Then, there’s Denny… The less said about him the better, because he should have been the first annoying character offed on screen and Shackelford deserves a Razzie nomination for this Freddy Got Fingered-inspired performance. Oh, and don’t believe the poster: Sean Astin is in this movie for the briefest, albeit most memorable, period.

It’s tough to root for any of these individuals when the interpersonal dynamics are cold and the drama feels shoehorned to fill the gaps between raptor kills. The script could have been dino-mite had the velociraptor hunted them down à la Leigh Whannel’s The Invisible Man. Instead, it’s never-ending references to Jurassic Park and forced hyuk-hyuk moments that fail to draw any laughs because none of the characters are funny – not even in a Sharknado way.

Is The Invisible Raptor worth watching?

Mike Hermosa gets innovative with the raptor kills and doesn’t shy away from the ridiculousness. It proves to be the right approach, or else it’s just splashes of blood and guts across the screen without context. Hermosa and collaborators utilize old-school movie magic tricks to attract attention to the “raptor” and lean into the ludicrous nature of the premise. It’s these scenes that will likely find themselves online and turn into memes, especially a specific moment where the invisible raptor controls a victim’s body to deceive their companion into thinking nothing is amiss.

Even so, it’s not enough to salvage the film from tedious blandness. As a horror comedy, it’s neither lowbrow nor highbrow, rather sitting as a frown. The Invisible Raptor starts off as a radical idea that could have become a modern-day cult classic, but it struggles to find its bite beyond that. Instead, it claws for attention to the point of irritation.