‘The VelociPastor’ Aspires To Be The Mel Brooks Movie That Troma Pictures Never Made

Making a bit of a viral splash around the time of Avengers: Endgame‘s release, writer/director/editor Brendan Steere’s zero-budget The VelociPastor —now available to stream on Amazon Prime— lands somewhere along the scale of the glib meta-awareness of Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber and the obnoxious exploitation excess of Stewart Raffill’s Tammy and the T-Rex. It’s wise to consider, though, that cult movies are seldom willed into existence. People who set out to make a midnight movie often just end up making arch, condescending garbage. To its credit, Steele’s flick isn’t quite that (or, closer to the point, it’s not always that). Clocking in at a fleet 71 minutes, by the time it starts to get genuinely insufferable it’s over. If it’s getting more attention than movies like this generally merit, blame a social media landscape that daily finds golden calfs to worship, and with the same thumb, sacred cows to destroy. It’s this short attention span’s Sharknado. It’ll be over in a second.

With a title ripped from the portmanteau brainstorming sessions of the SyFy Network, the film follows the exploits of Father Doug (Greg Cohan) who, after losing his parents to an exploding car, goes to China for some reason where he acquires a mysterious totem that occasionally turns him into, yes, a velociraptor. Going to China for a magical doodad is deeply offensive, of course, and part of a long tradition of Orientalism that had an old Chinese guy selling a mogwai in Gremlins and a dragon lady in the Freaky Friday remake offering up magic fortune cookies. Consider a moment halfway through when one (Erik Oh) of the troupe of evil ninjas delivers a monologue about a lost love in Korean, while others of their number speak in unaccented English and Cantonese, as his squad leader maps out a plan in a heavy Aussie accent. Its ineptness in representation is the joke, but when the leader of the bad guys is a bald Eisenhower-era Yellow Peril stereotype (Yang Jiechang), it’s right on the verge of indulging in the exact thing it purports to be lampooning. In other words, the charitable could possibly excuse this as a satire of racist portrayals rather than just, you know, racist. For me, I think it’s batting around .500.

The saving grace of The VelociPastor is that in the process of being the terrible Mel Brooks movie Troma Pictures never made, it actually lands a few gags. After waking up naked in the bed of a strange woman, Father Doug asks if she has something he can wear. Cut to the next scene and he’s wearing a short knit dress. The woman in question is hooker with a heart of gold Carol (Alyssa Kempinski – the spitting image of Jennifer Lawrence), studying to be a Doctor/Lawyer and encouraging Doug to embrace his Jurassic shapeshifting powers to assassinate scumbags like her pimp Frankie Mermaid (Fernando Pacheco De Castro). He’s called “Frankie Mermaid” because… well, better to leave some of the punchlines a surprise. Also good is the standard war buddy flashback sequence where Doug’s mentor Father Stewart (Daniel Steere) talks about his beloved Adeline back home and someone immediately makes a “Sweet Adeline” barbershop quartet reference. I like the film best when it sticks to the corny; when the target of the jabs are themselves being idiots and not social issues it’s not engineered to tackle, or the high camp classics it’s trying to flatter.

When the dino-suit finally makes its full-body appearance during a climactic battle, it’s so gloriously inept it becomes transcendent. At the moment that ill-fitting, inarticulate, homemade costume starts ripping prop arms out of empty sleeves, The VelociPastor challenges its audience to reckon with a film that’s completely dedicated to being mocked and derided. It’s almost aggressive in attracting barbs and its motives begin to feel patronizing, even hostile. Its central problem is that it takes shots at films that are already ritualistically ridiculed during screenings at rep theaters and in countless Mystery Science Theater knock-off YouTube channels, meaning it’s ultimately taking shots at movies someone made in earnest that for whatever reason didn’t turn out well. There’s evidence that Steele is a smart guy, but he spends most of that intelligence here punching down. When it cribs an iconic scene from Lam Ngai Kai’s Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, for example, it doesn’t have anything to say about it except that the effect is cheap-looking and the acting is pitched to hysterical.

The VelociPastor too often crosses the line from satire to bullying. It’s too bad. Still, credit its cast of some professionals, mostly friends and family for showing up and investing wholeheartedly in what feels at its heart to be a labor of love. If the surprisingly fine performances from Gohan and Kempinski especially were self-aware or smug, the whole exercise would be unwatchable. As it is, and for all its obvious flaws, The VelociPastor is not without a few idiot charms.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic forfilmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Stream The VelociPastor on Amazon Prime