The Velocipastor (2018)
When a priest loses his faith, God gives him the power to protect the innocent, but at what cost?
Every once in a while, you hear of a film that you think can’t possibly be real. There was one recently for a Plopcorn favourite, Tommy Wiseau where he battles a Big Shark (very much on our watch list); there are others too, Snake Outta Compton (our review is here) and then comes Velocipastor, a film that starter life as a trailer and by all means shouldn’t have ever been made. But made it was and BOY are we glad it was!
You may have also heard of the term ‘Grindhouse trailers’ before but not understood exactly what they are. It stems from the smaller ‘Grindhouse’ theatres dotted across the USA that primarily show b-type movies. You’d often get a double feature of movies and then a bunch of trailers for future films that were mostly fake.
Things to whet your appetite so to speak. Velocipastor was one such trailer that aired back in 2013 and it took 5 years to raise the $35,000 budget to let this movie magic happen. This film brings you everything you ever wanted to see in a movie; and if the title doesn’t give it away, there’s always the ninjas (and who doesn’t want ninjas’ in films?).
The Velocipastor tells the tale of a Catholic priest who needing to rediscover his faith goes on sabbatical and ends up becoming a Were-velociraptor through a contrived incident in China and when we say China, clearly it’s not the real China.
What follows is a vigilante narrative where our Velocipastor uses his ‘gift from God’ to rid the city of criminal scum, including Frankie Mermaid, one of our favourite villains of all time who just happens to be pimping out our hero’s love interest.
The first scene of the movie truly sets the scene in terms of the what you can expect, and we were half disbelieving and half laughing at what we saw. This alongside the plot you should be prepared to go through confusion and come out at hilarious.
The fact that there was such a small budget for the film means the special effects are, well, ‘special’. Rather than this being a disadvantage the film really plays on this and turns this into a real positive – well played sir! While never taking itself too seriously the film avoids being a slapstick cliché while still sending up its own genre of cheaply made movies. It really manages to deliver something that will have you laughing with genuine mirth and pleasure so much, you’ll want to watch again.
The sight of the Velocipastor arms half transformed is something we are going to treasure for a long time.
Overall, the film is one you really will want to see and one that, if you watch the video of us below of us watching the final fight scene, you can see we thoroughly enjoyed. We’ve given it 9.5/10 Plops and it’s probably as close as we ever got to giving it any film a 10. We suppose a perfect 10 is out there somewhere but it would have to be a bloody good film to beat this one!
