31 Days of Halloween

We’re finally getting into the territory of a work of Crocodellian Cinema that was released during my own personal memory and as an eleven year old I was very interested in the release of Lake Placid. The film looked like it might have been the next Anaconda, a film I very much enjoyed around the same time, but unlike that movie Lake Placid was rated R so I didn’t see it at the time and by the time I was old enough to do so my interest had disippated. This is actually the only real “major studio” movie I’m watching as part of this Crocodellian Cinema crash course having been produced by 20th Century Fox, who probably were inspired to greenlight this thing by the success of Anaconda (that year also gave us Deep Blue Sea). This made less than half what that movie did though for a couple of reasons. The aforementioned rating discrepancy probably had something to do with it also this movie’s cast is a lot less exciting: that movie had Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Owen Wilson, and Jon Voight all potentially in danger of being eaten by a giant snake, this movie just has Bill Pullman, Bridget Fonda, Oliver Platt, and a fairly young Brendan Gleeson tangling with this giant crocodile, who are all talented actors in various ways but it’s a less diverse and youth friendly ensemble. On top of that this movie has a much less exotic location given that it focuses on a giant Saltwater Crocodile that has inexplicably shown up in a New England lake rather than the jungle location that Anaconda benefited from.

The other reason this probably did worse than Anaconda is that, well, it’s just generally not as good of a movie. In fact I’d say for the first half of the movie when we’re stuck dealing with these boring characters instead of a predatory reptile the movie downright sucks. Things do pick up eventually though, especially when we’re introduced to the film’s most interesting cast member, Betty White, who plays a nutty and occasionally foul mouthed local. If you’ve ever wanted to hear a Golden Girl say the line “if I had a dick I’d tell you to suck it,” this is the movie for you. This is also chronologically the first crocodile movie I’m looking at that largely uses CGI rather than practical effects, which is ostensibly lamentable but I wouldn’t say that special effects are that big of a problem here. I wouldn’t say the crocodile here looks “real” per se, it’s noticeably CGI, but it doesn’t look terrible. Certainly better than late 90s mid-budget computer graphics could have looked like. The film also stages some moderately clever scenarios to put this crocodile into, like having it take a page from Jaws 2 and attack a seaplane. I’m not going to defend the movie too much, it’s ultimately very… B-movie-ish… but I did eventually find myself having fun with it. The movie didn’t do great at the box office and probably did curtail whatever interest Hollywood had in making creature features the next trend and form there the genre would increasingly head more into the direct-to-Syfy realm than to real theaters and in keeping with that patter this movie has a bunch of non-theatrical sequels but aside form that it doesn’t have that long of a legacy.
**1/2 out of Five