Many viewers will likely know whether they want to watch The VelociPastor purely by reading the title. Written, directed and edited by Brendan Steere, it’s exactly what it sounds like: after cutting his hand on a fossilized tooth during a trip to China, Father Doug Jones (Gregory James Cohan) suddenly gains the ability to turn into a “dragon warrior.” After returning to America and saving Carol (Alyssa Kempinski), a prostitute/pre-med/pre-law student from a gunman, the pair decide to use Doug’s newfound powers to punish the city’s criminals. However, they soon draw the attention of the order of ninjas funneling drugs into the city and their quest to beat them reveals unexpected truths about the deaths of Doug’s parents.
It sounds like a really dumb plot — and it’s supposed to because Steere isn’t trying to make a serious creature feature. Rather, he’s deliberately paying homage to cheap horror movies, making comedy out of the bad filmmaking that usually makes the genre so risible and in turn making a genuinely enjoyable film that will especially charm viewers familiar with the genre’s tropes. The dialogue is frequently silly and bad, but it works because the actors are all in on the joke. While some characters like Frankie Mermaid (Fernando Pacheco De Castro) the drug-dealing pimp are deliberately absurd, Cohan and Kempinski largely play their characters straight. Their performances are pure campy failed seriousness and Kempinski in particular perfectly plays up her character’s hooker-with-a-heart dialogue when Carol has a double entendre-filled conversation with Doug the morning after he saves her.
Speaking of that attack, lest viewers mistake Steere for a genuinely bad filmmaker, the way he films his creature speaks to his skill. In a similar way to Spielberg in Jaws, Steere limits the audience’s view of a the creature in the first few attacks — a flash of teeth here, a raised claw there. While it’s hard to say the scenes are genuinely scary, they are a clever recreation of the way low-budget genre films obfuscate their cheap special effects. However, unlike those films, Steere’s creature design is deliberately bad and those glimpses of the creature are just a tease until the film’s climactic ninja fight, when the full suit is revealed in all its hilariously awful glory.
Unfortunately, because the film’s style and sense of humor are so finely calibrated throughout, it makes the moments where Steere miscalculates stand out. While the over-long scenes of villains cackling quickly grow tiresome, the film’s most egregious mistake is the section that flashes back to Doug’s mentor, Father Stewart’s (Daniel Steere) time in Vietnam. The scene is ostensibly included to explain how Father Stewart met the exorcist he brings in to help Doug, but that plot thread is quickly forgotten in order to give the character a tragic backstory the audience is left to assume pushed him into the priesthood. It’s an unnecessary digression that distracts from the main plot and ruins the fun and easy pacing the film establishes up until then.
Still, considering how fun and clever The VelociPastor is before and after that scene, it’s hard to argue that a few bad choices ruin what’s an otherwise enjoyable send-up of cheap genre films. Steere and everyone involved clearly love the film’s they’re mocking and it’s easy to get caught up in their sense of play. Some viewers will likely dismiss the film based purely on its title and that’s their loss. It’s easy to make a bad movie, but by using his skill to make a deliberately bad movie, Steere’s made something truly transcendent.
The VelociPastor is available today on streaming and DVD with a Blu-ray release on September 17.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emUaCzIB1T8&feature=youtu.be
