WITH RAPTORS VS. RAFTERS, UNIVERSAL'S JURASSIC RIDE IS NO STROLL IN THE PARK.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

``I can't do blood. They won't let me do blood! No blood and no bodies!''

With that pleasant thought, Neil Engel lets loose with a ghoulish grin and an equally ghoulish cackle. Above him looms the head and torso of a disturbingly lifelike tyrannosaurus rex.

Hey, it's a Jurassic Park thing. You had to be there.

As chief designer of Jurassic Park - The Ride, Engel and his crew are busily fine-tuning Universal Studios' much-anticipated, $100 million high-tech fantasy. The six-acre Jurassic Park compound opens to the public on June 21, bringing an end to six years of breathless promotions and breathtaking technical challenges.

Engel's task, and that of the approximately 1,000 other people working on the project, is to make a three-dimensional world of robots seem as real as a two-dimensional movie - without getting downright disgusting.

With barely a week to go before the preview for VIPs and media, the behind-the-scenes atmosphere at Universal resembles a Broadway show prior to opening night, or the final wrap of a movie shoot. That's no coincidence, Engel says, because in many ways, creating a state-of-the-art theme park attraction is like making a film in your own back yard.

``Theme parks of this kind are very environmental,'' says Engel, a bearded, baseball-capped 36-year-old who could pass for Steven Spielberg's kid brother. ``We start them the same way you start a movie, which is with story-boarding. It's figuring out how to tell a story to an audience.''

The story told by Jurassic Park - The Ride, roughly follows the heart-racing contours of Spielberg's 1993 blockbuster, the top money-maker in Hollywood history.

Setting off in wide-bottomed 25-person rafts, passengers quickly find themselves in a surreal landscape of Mesozoic foliage and faux-primeval rock formations. Piped-in narration coyly informs visitors they'll be encountering only peaceful herbivores. Canned John Williams music enhances the spectacle of majestic waterfalls and animatronically correct stegosauruses.

``Steven Spielberg really laid down the gauntlet with the film, because he created dinosaurs unlike anything anybody had ever seen. Our challenge was to rise to that challenge,'' says Phil Hettema, Universal's senior vice president of attraction development.

There's also a friendly mama and baby ultrasaur, the former measuring five stories high from neck to head.

But, as in the film, things rapidly go awry, as the raft blunders into Carnivore Canyon, then hurdles past snarling, water-spitting flesh eaters and onto an 84-foot drop in pitch blackness, at speeds approaching 50 mph.

That's the part Engel REALLY likes.

``If they scream, that's when you know you've won,'' he says.

Heh, heh, heh.

Afterward, riders can steady their nerves with a juicy rack of ``Raptor Ribs'' at the Jurassic Cove Cafe, and a quick trip to Jurassic Outfitters, where you're sure to find something for the Homo sapien who has everything. When fully up and running, the ride should handle 3,000 customers an hour.

In planning the attraction, Engel says he was influenced more by classic horror movies and Z-grade sci-fi shlock such as ``War of the Gargantuas'' than by Splash Mountain or the Matterhorn.

In much the same way that a good action flick uses high-speed editing and jump-cuts to shift perspective, Jurassic Park - The Ride uses hairpin turns and distorted sight lines to control what its ``audience'' sees.

Every seemingly casual visual detail is calculated to fire the subconscious and pump the adrenal glands. At one point, for example, the riders drift by a deserted, debris-strewn raft filled with big teeth marks.

This ``scene'' was partly inspired by a similar moment in ``Aliens'' when Sigourney Weaver and friends stumble upon a wrecked outer-space camp.

``We're using the ride the way a director would use a camera platform,'' Engel asserts. ``Not only is it repeating images from (the riders') favorite films; they are in the frame. The same thing is happening to them that happened to Sam Neill in the movie.''

Engel admits it's not easy to surprise Southern Californians, who tend to show up at theme parks with an ``OK, impress me'' attitude.

Yet, even with nary a cadaver in sight, Jurassic Park - The Ride likely will scare the tar out of all but the most stalwart sub-third-graders.

At least, Engel certainly hopes so.

``I hope it's going to be terrifying and horrifying,'' he says gleefully. ``It's not funny-scary. This is reality. It's based on things that really walked the Earth.''

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) Visitors expecting to encounter only peaceful herbivores get more than they bargained for with Jurassic Park - The Ride.

(2) ``It's not funny-scary,'' says Neil Engel, chief designer of the ride. ``This is reality. It's based on things that really walked the Earth.''