"Last night was... amazing."
"What are you talking about?"
"The time you turned into a dinosaur and ate someone."
"WHAT?!"
The VelociPastor is a 2019 horror-science fiction-action-comedy in which a priest gains the power to transform into a dinosaur and kill evildoers.
Pastor Doug Jones (Greg Cohan) witnesses his parents' death and is left questioning his faith. During a trip to China to clear his head, he witnesses a woman be mortally wounded by a Ninja. She gives him a mysterious artifact that accidentally infects him when he cuts his hand. Back home again, he begins to feel strange urges which leads to him transforming into a velociraptor. He decides to use his curse for good and unleash his inner beast on evildoers.
Starting out as a 2011 fake trailer that gained a cult following, the filmmakers expanded the idea out to a full motion picture. Shot on a $35,000 budget, this intentionally hokey film repeatedly draws attention to its own cheapness and ludicrous premise.
A sequel, The VelociPastor 2, was successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter in 2022, gathering almost $120,000 in pledges. Principal filming finished in 2023 and the film is in post-production.
"Only through the elimination of tropes can we achieve world peace"
- Artistic License – Paleontology: Played for Laughs. When Doug finally unleashes his velociraptor form... it's clearly not a velociraptor. Not that anyone expects any accuracy from a floppy T. rex suit doing kung-fu.
- Asshole Victim: Doug's first victim is a sleazy mugger who was holding Carol at knifepoint. The rest of his victims are similar criminals (including Frankie Mermaid, who he snapped and killed after he bragged to Doug about killing his parents) or ninjas who attacked him first. The only person he killed who didn't have it coming in some way is Father Stewart, and who turns out to still be alive, just held captive by ninjas.
- Battle Couple: Doug and Carol. After their first night together, three ninjas dive through the windows, and the two of them fight them off together. She then accompanies him to the ninja base, where the two of them both proceed to kick ass.
- B-Movie: Very intentionally so. Besides the ridiculous premise, the acting and dialogue is very over-the-top and cheesy, the film has several different genres that all conflict with each other, there are multiple scenes where effects are missing with [INSERT VFX HERE] text in their place, and the boom mic is visible in some shots.
- Cain and Abel: Sam and Doug. While Doug comes to realize that he needs to use his powers to do good regardless of what the church says about either killing or dinosaurs, Sam joined the Christian ninja school apparently just so he'd have the opportunity to kill Doug and get revenge for how their parents very blatantly preferred Doug over him, with Doug ultimately killing him in their duel.
- Cheated Death, Died Anyway: Father Stewart survives getting mauled by Doug's uncontrolled raptor form, only to get killed for good by Wei Chan when he refuses to go along with his plot for world domination.
- Confess in Confidence: Brought up by Carol, who tells Doug that he should use his velociraptor powers to kill criminals who confess their crimes to him instead of giving them comfort by absolving them, and he retorts that it's not his place to kill people and that god wouldn't want him to do that. This is put to the test immediately afterward, when Frankie Mermaid (Carol's pimp) comes in that afternoon for confession and proceeds to light a cigarette and spend the whole time bragging about his drug dealing, extortion, robbery, and various murders... including that of Doug's parents. Doug rips him apart.
- Corrupt Church: The ultimate villain of the movie is Wei Chan, who runs a Christian ninja school and who wants to gain followers by introducing a highly addictive form of cocaine to get people addicted, then pull it from the market so that users will go to Christian self-help groups after they're unable to get more, and brainwashing the users into becoming super-soldiers for God (really, just Wei Chan).
- Covers Always Lie: Doug's dinosaur form looks absolutely nothing like the creature on the cover.
- Crisis of Faith: After his parents are killed five minutes into the movie, Doug's faith in god is shaken and he doesn't know if he can continue as a pastor. Father Stewart encourages him to go some traveling abroad to clear his head, kicking off the rest of the plot.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Parodied. Father Stewart darkly says he hasn't seen Altair since 'the war', with the scene transitioning to a flashback of him in Vietnam, where we see his friend get shot seconds after bragging about how he was going to survive the war without a single scratch, followed immediately afterwards by his girlfriend showing up to visit him (somehow) and stepping on a landmine that reduces her to a fine spray of blood.
- Epigraph: "Only through the elimination of violence will be finally be able to achieve world peace." - Gandhi. Superimposed over a shot of our hero screaming, covered in blood, and triumphantly holding up the head of the villain. It's a Shout-Out to Miami Connection, another hokey, ludicrous, and cheap movie which was super violent but denounced violence, which very likely made up the Gandhi quote.
- Even Evil Has Standards: When Carol is "killed", the very same ninja who have just "killed" her starts weeping as Doug cries for her.
- Evil Laugh: After the leader of the ninjas explains their evil plan to one of his minions, they both indulge in this. And it goes on for minutes.
- Foreshadowing: When Doug has a flashback to eating a meal with his parents, there is a fourth plate at the table but no fourth person, suggesting a fourth family member. Sure enough, we later meet Doug's brother, Sam.
- Funny Background Event: When Doug comforts a "dying" Carol, the ninjas are sobbing and comforting each other.
- Genre Roulette: Played for Laughs, and a homage to cut-together grindhouse flicks that mashed up unrelated films. Father Stewart's random Vietnam flashback takes a detour into a crappy war drama during a Hammer Horror and pre-The '60s horror homage of Doug being exorcised by a takeoff on Vincent Price, and not long after, a ninja sent after Doug randomly flashes back on his sensei's prophecy in the vein of a wuxia or Jidaigeki movie, and the final act becomes a cheesy cross between toku, wuxia, and shitty martial arts flicks from The '80s like Miami Connection.
- Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Carol. She's turning tricks to put herself through medical and law school, convinces Doug to use his abilities for good, and becomes his love interest.
- Informed Species: Doug's dinosaur form is described as a Velociraptor, but even by the low standards of the film industry, he's way off, with extremely chunky proportions, a huge head with small eyes, tiny arms, no sickle-claws, and an upright stance that leaves his tail dragging on the ground—at that point, adding that he's too big and doesn't have feathers feels almost unnecessary. He looks a lot more like older depictions of large theropods like Tyrannosaurus or Allosaurus. Also, theropods don't do kung-fu... we hope.
- Interchangeable Asian Cultures: The presence of (Christian) Hollywood-style ninjas in China is definitely meant to be an intentional use of this.
- Instant Awesome, Just Add Ninja: Ninjas abound! They're a Christian sect of assassins under an evil overlord
- Ludicrous Gibs: In a flashback, Father Stewart's girlfriend steps on a mine and is instantly liquified.Soldier: I don't think we can do anything for her, she's too far gone.
- Mission from God: Doug comes to see his ability to become a velociraptor as God blessing him with the ability to rid the world of evil, though Father Stewart disagrees.
- Mook Horror Show: Doug's victims are frequently terrified, and for good reason.
- New Powers as the Plot Demands: Doug inexplicably gains telekinesis to grab a sword when fighting Sam, using them to defeat him and then never mentioning or using them again.
- Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: The entire promise of the movie, with a vigilante were-velociraptor priest fighting Christian ninjas.
- Non-Uniform Uniform: Exaggerated Trope. The wartime flashback shows that none of the soldiers are wearing any standard uniform at all, instead having various garments with non-matching camo patterns or even just simple OD green T-shirts with jeans, to give the impression that the filmmaker had no money for wardrobe and told the actors to just wear whatever kind of "army stuff" they could get.
- Once More, with Clarity: After it's revealed that the ninja lieutenant is Doug's brother Sam, we see the previous flashbacks of Doug's happy memories with his parents, with the camera zooming out to show Sam was standing just out of frame in each of them.
- Only Sane Man: The ninjas in the final battle - when they're not being raptor food - all recognise how absurd (and sad) the entire affair is, such as sobbing over Carol's death.
- Plot Hole: Numerous, and almost always lampshaded. One example is how and why Father Stewart's American girlfriend got to a Vietnamese warzone where she stepped on a landmine, with one of the other soldiers next him wondering what she was even doing there.
- Power Nullifier: Wei Chan uses a special anti-venom that the ninjas developed to fight again the dinosaur warriors. When Doug is shot with an arrow coated with it, he's left unable to transform into a velociraptor. Unfortunately for Wei, while the antidote may have affected the rest of Doug's body, it did not affect his hands.
- Secret-Keeper: Doug's prostitute friend Carol is the only one who knows he turns into a dinosaur, having found out after he (in raptor form) saved her from a mugger.
- Shout-Out:
- In the end, when Doug rips the head off of the lead ninja, the film briefly pauses to show a quote from Gandhi, "Only through the elimination of violence can we achieve world peace." This is a reference to Miami Connection, which ends with the same quote even though the hero had just solved all of his problems by brutally murdering the main villain. It also shouts out Blood Debts by interrupting the ending with a total Non Sequitur, though at least our hero isn't serving life in prison this time.
- Father Stewart's girlfriend showing up in Vietnam out of the blue is a reference to The Things They Carried and the film adaptation of one of its chapters, where a GI's girlfriend hitches a ride to Vietnam and becomes more hardcore and bloodthirsty than him. Unfortunately for Father Stewart's girlfriend, she steps on a landmine before any of that can happen.
- The Genre Roulette at play serves as one to Death Proof and grindhouse in general, where multiple unrelated films were stitched together, often incoherently.
- Special Effects Failure: Done repeatedly for laughs. When Doug's parents are killed in a burning car, the scene simply has white text saying "VFX: car on fire" over an empty chunk of street while he hammily screams in horror. Later, his "velociraptor" form is a cheap T. rex suit about to fall off at any minute.
- Stylistic Suck: The central premise of the film is being intentionally bad for comedic purposes, ranging from deliberately missing VFX, jarring Jump Cuts, completely random dips into other movies, shitty stunts and martial arts, and really bad costumes.
- Transformation Horror: Parodied. The transformation is supposed to be horrible In-Universe, but the cheapness of the effects makes it look ridiculous. This is of course, deliberate.
- Unexplained Recovery: Carol is dead dead during the final battle from a slashed chest, but is alive and well with zero explanation in the ending.
- The Un-Favourite: Sam was so much the unfavorite that his father told his brother Doug right in front of him that he was his only son.
- War Is Hell: Father Stewart has a flashback to his time in the Vietnam war where he watched his friend get shot and his wife explode into a red paste.