The VelociPastor

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The VelociPastor takes a joke that should be over by the end of a fake trailer and somehow turns it into a whole damn movie. A priest turns into a dinosaur and fights ninjas. The real miracle is how often it gets a laugh out of something other than that sentence.

The trick is that the jokes have actual setups and payoffs. Early on, the movie substitutes a visual-effects placeholder for an exploding car and lets the priest react like he’s just witnessed a tragedy. The longer he commits to the horror of what he’s seeing, the funnier that bare patch of screen gets. That takes better comic timing than you’d expect from a movie that eventually asks you to buy a dinosaur suit as an instrument of divine justice.

The tiny budget buys exactly what it needs. A little fake blood, some ninjas, and a dinosaur costume that looks like it would be a real bastard to get out of in an emergency will get you surprisingly far. The crew knows when to cut away and when to give you a good, long look at what they paid for. And when the dinosaur finally gets to tear into somebody, there’s real joy in watching a bunch of people figure out how to make that happen with what they had on hand.

What I like most is how comfortable The VelociPastor is being its own ridiculous thing. It has enough affection for cheap genre movies to skip the parade of references, and the cast plays the priest’s crisis of faith with a straight face even when the solution is clearly “more dinosaur.” There’s a moment when you realize you’ve gone from laughing at the idea of a priest fighting ninjas to actively rooting for him to turn into a dinosaur and eat one. That’s when the movie earns its title.

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