I just recently watched the Kurt Russell vehicle Miracle.

That’s… that’s not what this article is about. But it actually takes place at Lake Placid, New York, which is more than I can say for the movie we ARE actually reviewing today. Funny thing: you could actually switch the names of the two movies–call the ice hockey one “Lake Placid” and call the crocodile one “Miracle”–and they both still work! It’s the little things like that that make doing these articles worthwhile.

Anyway, Miracle is a pretty good flick. Kurt Russell rules as usual. Check it out!

In the meantime, let’s talk about a little horror offering from right before the turn of the millennium, the ACTUAL Lake Placid.

Lake Placid entered my peripheral vision a few days ago when one of my favorite podcasts covered it on an episode. Hearing them talk about it, it seemed like as good a time as any to look it up. And you know what? It’s currently one of the first movies listed under Shudder’s “Most Popular” section, so the whole universe was lining up for me to watch this motion picture!

As I alluded to earlier, Lake Placid is the story of a body of water in Maine called Black Lake, so I don’t even know what we are doing here. At the start of the flick, we see a game warden and a sheriff out trying to tag beavers when the former is bitten in half by some ferocious predator. This sees a love-scorned paleontologist from New York sent to verify what the monster in the lake is, and she quickly meets up with another game warden, this one played by the President from Independence Day!

As the sheriff, paleontologist, and warden start their investigation, they are joined by a rich… mythology expert (?) who is obsessed with swimming with crocodiles, and he tells them that’s what they are on the trail of. And what do you know? He’s soon proven right! But will any of them live to tell the tale?

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ It’s a cheap gimmick, sure, but the screenwriter getting to shove a bunch of extremely vulgar remarks into Betty White’s mouth is a lot of fun. One of America’s Golden Girls telling other people to suck her dick is kind of a blast. She really has the best lines in the whole movie, even when she isn’t just cursing up a storm, like when she tells the deputy she is cheering for the crocodile to eat the protagonists. “Is that illegal?” she muses, “To wish for the chewing of law enforcement?”

But it’s even better when she is allowed to be more vulgar. Like I said, it’s a bit shticky having an adorable old lady swearing at everyone. But I can appreciate that! Shtick is fun.

+ To the movie’s credit, you get to see a fair amount of the crocodile, and it doesn’t look that bad at all for what couldn’t possibly have been a high-budget movie from 1999. I would have imagined we would only get about ten minutes of solid croc action (if that much), but we get probably around double that in a movie with a sub-90 minute runtime. Literally double, too, because there even ends up being two crocodiles!

So bully to this movie for having the gall to show our antagonist in action and having the effects to back it up. 

– Ultimately, it’s a really silly movie about a monster crocodile hunting a motley crew of law enforcement, scientists, and rich assholes. It’s not changing the world or anything. It’s just a dopey horror movie with a creature feature premise and a medium budget that is still larger than it deserves. These kinds of movies have to top out somewhere, and I don’t see any reasonable person giving this movie five stars. It is what it is, it knows what it is, and that’s all that it is.

But you know what? There are two Friday the 13th sequels I have given 4.5 stars to, so maybe this is wildly hypocritical of a point for me to make. So here’s your grain of salt. And if you want to give Lake Placid 5 stars, don’t let me stop you.

– Bridget Fonda and Bill Pullman do not have any chemistry, least of all any of the romantic variety. They just aren’t believable as the leading pair of this picture. Honestly, Oliver Platt and Brendan Gleason are more entertaining, and they didn’t need the other two. I would have enjoyed this picture just as much if it were just the two of them bickering on the lake, with Gleason constantly falling into Platt’s traps.

But yeah, the point here is that while Fonda and Pullman don’t terribly detract from the film or anything, they are just a really mundane pairing. And their relationship never feels natural or like these two different worlders would ever come together. Who is going to see Lake Placid for the secondary love story, anyway? 

OVERALL

Twenty-six years later, Lake Placid surprisingly holds up as a schlocky ride creature feature. The cast is surprisingly stacked with stars, and the effects work is not bad at all. Obviously some scenes look better than others, but for the most part, everything is passable. On the one hand, it definitely feels like a relic of its era when this kind of film would get a big theatrical release, but on the other hand… maybe that era wasn’t so bad after all.