The Eric Roberts Collection: Raptor (dir by Jim Wynorski)

Posted on April 9, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2001’s Raptor, Eric Roberts stars as Jim Tanner, the sheriff of a small desert town. When the locals start turning up all shredded to heck, Sheriff Tanner suspects that maybe it was an animal attack. When the sheriff’s daughter (Lorissa McComas) witnesses one of the attacks and goes into a coma as a result, Tanner is determined to get justice, even if it means working with his ex-girlfriend, Barbara (Melissa Brasselle).

It turns out that it’s neither coyotes nor bears that are attacking the folks in the desert. Instead, it’s a bunch of dinosaurs that have been brought back into existence by Dr. Hyde (Corbin Bernsen, wearing a beret), a mad scientist who has a laboratory in a secret government installation. When the army realizes that there’s a bunch of mini-dinosaurs roaming the desert, they send in a special taskforce to take care of the problem.

It’s a pretty simple movie and no one in the cast, Roberts included, really seems to be taking it all that seriously. There a few scenes where Corbin Bernsen looks like he’s about to break out laughing at some of his dialogue. Director Jim Wynorski keeps the action moving and tosses in plenty of blood and a little nudity. If you’ve ever seen any of the other films that Wynorski directed for producer Roger Corman, you’ll know what to expect from Raptor.

The dinosaurs are cute. They’re all obviously puppets and there’s a lot of scenes of them moving quickly through the desert with an intense look in their eyes. Apparently, almost all of the dinosaur footage was lifted from the first three Carnosaur films, which perhaps explains why the film suddenly goes from being about Sheriff Tanner trying to protect his town from the dinosaurs to being about a bunch of soldiers hunting for the dinosaurs in Dr. Hyde’s underground lab. It’s cheap but it’s kind of fun, a timewaster that no one should take seriously.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

Murderbot (2023, directed by Jim Wynorski)

Posted on October 2, 2023 by Jedadiah Leland

“Blow harder!”

— Val (Lauren Parkinson) in Murderbot

In a remote army base, three busty scientists create a busty robot named Raquel (Melissa Brasselle). General Griffin (Arthur Sellers) is impressed that Raquel has mastered all forms of combat but he is not happy by her dominatrix outfit because, according to him, America’s enemies don’t fear cleavage.

One night, while the scientists all have hot dates, Raquel escapes from the base and goes to a nearly deserted desert town, where she kills a leering gas station attendant and a busty diner owner. Meanwhile, a group of busty teenagers and their boyfriends run out of gas while driving through town and find themselves being stalked by Raquel.

This is a Jim Wynorski film so you know what you’re going to get, a lot of cleavage (though, for once, no actual nudity), a splattering of blood, and some deliberately corny humor that is sometimes self-aware enough to be funny. Murderbot was originally named Killbot, a reference to Wynorski’s first film, Chopping Mall. Murderbot even duplicates that film’s famous exploding head scene, though it’s the entire body that explodes this time.

This is pretty dumb but Wynorski fans should be happy. Even though no one will be watching this movie for the acting, I actually did like the performances of Walker Mintz and Sylvia Thackery, playing respectively a trumpet player and the girl that he likes. As Raquel, Melissa Brasselle is no Arnold Schwarzenegger but she still handles dreadful one-liners like “You’ve been deleted,” with enough aplomb to make them tolerable.

Murderbot is proof that, no matter how much things change, Jim Wynorski will always by Jim Wynorksi.

Cinemax Friday: Demolition High (1996, directed by Jim Wynorski)

Posted on July 17, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

A group of terrorists take over a high school and announce that, unless their demands are met, they will launch a nuclear missile at a nuclear power plant which I guess will cause double the nuclear destruction. Since they already have a nuclear missile, it feels like also threatening to blow up the power plant is definite overkill. With the school now full of terrorists and explosives, it’s up to one student to kill the terrorists one-by-one and save his classmates. It’s Die Hard in a High School (cool!), with the Bruce Willis role being taken on by … COREY HAIM!

That bit of casting tells you both why Demolition High doesn’t work and also why anyone would be watching this direct-to-video “action” film in the first place. The 25 year-old Haim plays Lenny Slater, a high school student who knows Kung Fu because he grew up in the Bronx. His father (played by Alan Thicke!) moves to a small town, both to become a police chief and to hopefully keep Lenny from getting into any more trouble. Lenny’s all trouble, though, and terrorist leader Luther (the great Jef Kober) is about to discover that he’s invaded the wrong high school.

If I had watched this film in the 90s or even the early aughts, I would have laughed at how bad Corey Haim is as an action hero but today, knowing all we know about his life and how Hollywood essentially enabled his worst tendencies and then abandoned him when he become too self-destructive to work, it’s not as easy to watch an obviously troubled actor who has gone from being a big star to appearing in a direct-to-video Die Hard rip-off. Trying to disguise the fact that he’s too old to be playing a high school student, Haim wears a flannel shirt and an earring and has a bowl cut. Whenever he talks to his classmates, you expect him to say, “How do you do, fellow kids?” As heavily edited as the fight scenes are, it’s still obvious that Haim had no idea how to throw a punch. On the plus side, even while obviously addled by drug abuse, Corey Haim was still a better actor than Stephen Seagal.

Demolition High is pretty dumb but it was directed by Jim Wynorski so at least there’s some inside jokes. Gerrit Graham and Dick Van Patten both have small roles and Alan Thicke gets to tell an FBI agent to “Think with your heart, not with your badge.” Wynorski also cast Melissa Brasselle as Tayna, a sexy terrorist who wears black leather. He deserves some credit for that. (When the film was released on video, Brasselle was featured on the cover, not Haim.) Some of the techniques that Lenny uses to take out the terrorists are creative, if never really plausible. In this case, Lenny is helped by the stupidity of the terrorists. It’s not every evil terrorist who is clumsy enough to stumble head first into a table saw.

Demolition High was apparently successful enough to be followed by a sequel, Demolition U. I’ll look at the movie tomorrow.