Steve Miner (1999)

Jaws with a crocodile, if you like, although it’s unfair to Spielberg’s film even to mention it in the same breath as this pathetic monster movie.  ‘A wolf in New England?!’ is a refrain in Mike Nichols’s Wolf; and the people in Lake Placid repeatedly exclaim, ‘A crocodile in Maine?!’’  At least the wolf in Wolf is fantastical.  I never did get to understand how a pair of saltwater crocodiles – the world’s largest reptiles, found, according to Wikipedia, in ‘suitable habitats from Northern Australia through Southeast Asia to the eastern coast of India’ – had fetched up in a freshwater lake in North America.  (It isn’t the real Lake Placid – the ironic ‘placid’ gives a pretty good idea of the level of wit in David E Kelley’s script.)  The film ends with the dotty old lady who lives on the shores of the fictional Black Lake feeding tiddler baby crocs at the edge of the water – presumably to flag up the idea of a sequel.  In fact Lake Placid, although it did well at the box office, didn’t spawn in the cinema; but there have been two made-for-TV sequels and a telefilm called ‘Lake Placid: The Final Chapter’ is now in production.  Even if the prototype weren’t so bad, I don’t see what sequels could amount to. Once Lake Placid has played its weak, environmentally aware hand, the crocodile is no longer an absolutely scary monster.  It pales into a to-be-protected species.   The main characters argue about whether or not the animal should be killed – the crocodile enthusiasts win the day and it’s eventually tranquillised.  In the words of the plot synopsis on Wikipedia, ‘They load the crocodile on a truck and take it to Portland, Maine until they can figure out what to do with it’.  The second half of that sentence is a spot on (even if inadvertent) indictment of the feeble plotting.   The people in Lake Placid are so uninteresting that it’s fair enough that the man-eating monster’s survival is the main dramatic issue.  Even so, I couldn’t believe this was the end of the film (though I was relieved that it was).

We know within five minutes there’s something powerful and carnivorous beneath the calm surface of the lake, when a diver from the local marine fish and game department has his body amputated from the midriff downwards.  The spats between the various characters that follow from this admittedly shocking prologue are immediately exposed as filler.  The four principals are Bridget Fonda, as a snippy palaeontologist who works in the Natural History Museum in New York (the Museum is called in because a tooth that looks to be prehistoric is found lodged in the diver’s remains);  Brendan Gleeson, as the local sheriff who was in the boat with the unfortunate diver at the start; Bill Pullman, as the head of the marine fish and game outfit; and, a little later, Oliver Platt, as a mythology professor who somehow perceives the spiritual dimension of crocodiles.  There’s no love lost between any of the pairings in this quartet – nor even any sex, although Pullman starts giving Fonda come-hither looks and she twitchily reciprocates.   This ill-assorted team and the elderly lady who lives by the lake (Betty White) seem meant to have an oddball Twin Peaks-ish charm but only Gleeson and Pullman manage not to be annoying.  The sweetly smiling geriatric has a profane turn of phrase – it’s always hilarious, of course, when either a child or an old person talks dirty.  Because the dialogue includes a lot of sarcasm and insults the film might seem not to be taking itself seriously – but how many commercial scary films of recent decades haven’t been knowing?  (The director Steve Miner made his name with the Friday the 13th series.)  Lake Placid merely alternates between verbal stroppiness and straight horror.  After that first jolt supplied by the dismembered diver, the horror is ponderous and mechanical.  The only thing that’s breathtaking is how unimaginative the script is.  The croc may be a geographic turn up for the books but I was amazed the monster of the deep wasn’t revealed to be something more outlandish.

9 April 2012