The VelociPastor is the Killer Dinosaur Pastor Movie We Want and Need
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
One of the many wonderful aspects of this column is that it forces me to see the kind of ridiculous, high-concept, gleefully absurd cult oddities that I have built my career upon celebrating and eviscerating, sometimes simultaneously.
Free will is such a burden and a chore. The great thing about Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 is that it removes free will from the equation and FORCES me to see movies like 2017’s The Velocipastor, a zero-budget horror-action comedy about a mild-mannered man of the Lord who transforms into a fearsome dinosaur when he’s angry.
The VelociPastor is essentially a mash-up of two other camp classics I have written up for this column: the transcendent rock and roll martial arts masterpiece The Miami Connection, the very first Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 subject, and the R-rated version of Tammy and the T-Rex.
It’s as if the makers of The VelociPastor challenged themselves to come up with a premise so outrageous that it would make the central conceit of Tammy and the T-Rex—the brain of a nearly dead jock played by Paul Walker inhabiting the body of a killer mechanical dinosaur in a mad quest for revenge—look as austere and somber as The Bicycle Thief by comparison.
The VelociPastor even ends with a triumphant freeze frame accompanied by Miami Connection’s notoriously heavy-handed, straight-faced message—“Only through the elimination of of violence will we finally be able to achieve world peace”—cheekily and falsely credited to Gandhi.
The cracked genius of Miami Connection, a minor miracle of a motion picture, is that the lunatics who made it took it very seriously. In their minds, they weren’t created a crazy cult classic for bad movie aficionados to laugh at: they were making Enter the Dragon crossed with A Hard Day’s Night.
They didn’t just set out to make a good movie, they set out to make a great movie that was important as well as entertaining. For the geniuses behind Miami Connection there’s absolutely nothing goofy or ironic or campy about the phrase “Only through the elimination of of violence will we finally be able to achieve world peace.” On the contrary, it’s a serious message befitting a serious message movie.
For The VelociPastor, those words could not be more goofily tongue-in-cheek. That extends to the rest of the film as well. To call it an elaborate goof would be a little too generous: it’s a goof alright, but there’s nothing particularly elaborate about it.
According to Wikipedia, The Velocipastor was made for a mere 35,000 dollars but audiences could be forgiven for assuming that its actual budget was more in the area of thirty-five dollars. The filmmakers save money by forgoing decadent luxuries like extras, production values and special effects.
For some reason I assumed that CGI had gotten cheap enough that a movie this low-budget could afford to realize its rampaging dinosaur through the magic of computer animation. I was wrong.
The dinosaur in The Velocipastor is just somebody in a ridiculous dinosaur suit. He’s not convincing as a dinosaur. He’s not supposed to be. This is not Jurassic World. This is a movie where a pastor turns into a dinosaur and wreaks havoc on ninjas and pimps. It is not particularly concerned with verisimilitude.
If The VelociPastor never stops winking at the audience, Gregory James Cohan, the actor who plays Doug Jones, the title character, plays it deliciously straight. Cohan really leans into his character’s angst and anger as well as his furious determination to do the right thing.
Doug Jones, VelociPastor and one-man army in the war against evil, is part Were-Dinosaur and part trippy superhero, with a little Jeckyl & Hyde thrown in. Like pretty much all superheroes, our preposterous protagonist has an original story rooted in parental death.
Doug opens the film delivering a sermon to an unseen audience before stepping out of his church just in time to see a car explosion kill his beloved parents. Only because The VelociPastor costs thirty-five thousand dollars to make, instead of an actual explosion we see the word VFX: Car on fire, which is certainly less visually dynamic than an actual car on fire but gets the general point across much more cost efficiently.
In his angst, the future shape-shifter travels to China, where he becomes infected with the spirit of a Dragon Warrior. The no longer milquetoast man of faith begins blacking out and transforming into a vengeance-crazed dinosaur.
Doug forms an odd couple partnership with Carol (Alyssa Kempinski) a very worldly woman who is employed as a sex worker to raise money for her pre-law and pre-med classes, though she despairs that the market for prostitute-lawyer-doctors is distressingly small.
Turning into a dinosaur at opportune and inopportune moments upends Doug’s whole belief system. “Dinosaurs never existed, and even if they did, I don’t transform into one!” he insists, seemingly as much for his own benefit as anyone else’s, but he knows deep down in his Dino-bones that’s just not true.
The rage-filled priest’s bond with the streetwalker is strengthened when he murders her pimp, Frankie Mermaid, who we learn acquired his name because he is “swimming in bitches.”
Doug resolves to use his dino-super-powers for good, by enacting harsh punishment on the sinners whose crimes he hears in confession. This puts the pontiff turned velociraptor on a collision course with Christian ninjas with a seriously confused scheme for spreading the gospel through getting people hooked on cocaine.
Watching The Velociraptor, I experienced flashbacks to my days as a thankless juror of student video competitions at the University of Wisconsin, where I went to college and began my career as a pop culture writer. The student films I saw for them represented cruel karmic punishment more than conventional entertainment.
The VelociPastor is adorably homemade, with a vibe that’s one-third home movie and two-thirds top-tier Troma.
Like the best Troma, The Velociraptor isn’t the exhausted, one joke vulgarity parade you might expect from its title or premise but rather a three or four joke movie, some of them actually pretty funny.
It certainly helps that The Velociraptor has the decency and good judgment to understand that if any motion picture has the right to shimmy under even the 75 minute mark and still consider itself an actual movie, it’s something with this title and premise.
The VelociPastor gets in and out in seventy minutes. It does not overstay its welcome. Going in I imagined that a movie with this premise would either be an utter delight, pure goofy fun, or unwatchably smug and self-satisfied in its condescending take on trash movie tropes.
Instead the plucky little independent trifle falls somewhere squarely in the middle. I certainly enjoyed it and appreciated its merciful succinctness but it’s also a flimsy little wisp of a thing whose occasional amateurishness is simultaneously endearing and annoying.
Still, if The VelociPastor’s title makes you chuckle, the film will as well, which is about all you can ask for with a project this ingratiatingly modest as well as conceptually insane.
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