Release Date: July 16, 1999
Starring: Bill Pullman, Bridget Fonda, Oliver Platt, Brendan Gleeson, Betty White
Directed by: Steve Miner
Distributed by: 20th Century Fox Films Corp.
MPAA Rating: R (violent creature attacks and related gore, language)
About ten or fifteen minutes into Lake Placid, a man swims up to a beaver's nest, underwater, in search of God-knows-what. The audience, having seen the trailers, knows that there's a giant man-eating lizard in the water; but of course, to set the tone for the movie, somebody has to get eaten, and this guy is it. Anyway -- he swims up to the beaver's nest, and all of the sudden a beaver comes swimming out. The audience jumps, and is truly frightened.
That's the first and last time it happens.
From then on, Lake Placid is an 85-minute excuse to blow up a crocodile, because everything that leads up to the foregone conclusion of an ending is just the simple process of stacking dominoes in a row before tipping the first one.
As soon as the croc makes his ominous appearance in scene one, we're introduced to fish and game warden Jack Wells (Bill Pullman). He's on Maine's Black Lake to investigate the disappearances, dismemberments, and disagreements between a sorry cast of principal characters. Also on hand is museum girl Kelly Scott (Bridget Fonda), present because a seemingly ancient but unfossilized tooth was recovered from a victim; local sheriff Hank Keough (Brendan Gleeson), present because he has no place else to be; and international croc wrestler Hector Cyr (Oliver Platt), present for obvious reasons. Together the group tracks the monster, intent on destroying or capturing it, all the while risking their necks in the name of scientific discovery.
In the middle of all this, Jack and Kelly decide to start a small but painfully torrid romance, one that's both out of place and out of luck. There's no romantic chemistry between Pullman and Fonda, and although it doesn't really happen until the movie's over, it still has the smell of a gratuitous plot device, thrown in as a genre trademark.
Other genre trademarks include the typically expensive but rather unimpressive crocodile, a special effect that, from head to toe, doesn't really live up to the audience's expectations. It receives fairly little screen time, and it's so built up by director Steve Miner that when it actually appears it's impossible for it to live up to the hype.
But it's quite possible that nine-tenths of the budget for Lake Placid was spent on the croc, because everything else, from the cast to the photography to the score, has the look and feel of a B-movie. In that sense, it's good that the movie runs less than an hour and a half in length, because even as a tongue-in-cheek product it's not good enough to sustain itself for longer than ninety minutes. Miner, director of the most recent Halloween sequel, doesn't really have any solid plan for the film, either, and it's most obvious. Every trick in the creature-eats-people subgenre is lined up in a row, and when the end of list arrives, it's time to roll the credits.
With few surprises and no true point of being, Lake Placid is just a sorry waste of summer movie dollars. Hardly worth seeing.
all contents © 1999 Craig Roush