LAKE PLACID (1999)
Rating: 2.5 stars (out of 4.0) ******************************** Key to rating system: 2.0 stars - Debatable 2.5 stars - Some people may like it 3.0 stars - I liked it 3.5 stars - I am biased in favor of the movie 4.0 stars - I felt the movie's impact personally or it stood out ********************************* A Movie Review by David Sunga
Directed by: Steve Miner
Written by: David E. Kelley
Starring: Bridget Fonda, Bill Pullman, Oliver Platt, Brendan Gleeson, Betty White
Synopsis: Paleontologist Kelly (Bridget Fonda) goes to Maine to investigate an animal attack and meets up with Jack (Bill Pullman) from the Fish and Game Service, Sheriff Keough (Brendan Gleeson) and eccentric mythology professor, Hector Cyr (Oliver Platt). The heroes discover that a 30-foot man-eating crocodile is the culprit and decide they must catch it. Meanwhile old Mrs. Bickerman (Betty White) is rooting for the reptile.
Opinion: As reptiles, crocs don't have the metabolism to be insatiably hungry (they get hungry only once every two weeks). And fatal hippo attacks outnumber croc attacks in Africa. Like many scary beasts, crocs are an endangered species, having been terrorized by that scariest animal of all, the modern human. So LAKE PLACID wasn't meant to be realistic.
Not really a horror flick but a campy satire LAKE PLACID has its humor. I had heard LAKE PLACID was about a giant alligator (a corruption of the Spanish word el largato) in Black Lake, so I envisioned a 1950s B-grade black and white flick where privileged folks with scientific gear and names like Kay and Mark and Sheriff run around a lagoon trying to capture a mysterious menace while superstitious locals fearfully look on.
LAKE PLACID does the same kind of envisioning, if only to poke fun at old B-movies. The camera introduces a beaver with JAWS-type music. Then Kelly, Jack, Hector and Sheriff are cast as terribly sardonic and satirical people who think every one else is a weirdo. They approach the adventure as if it is a sarcasm contest. And instead of terrified villagers, Betty White shows up as a snide and foul-mouthed local who is rooting against the authorities and for the crocodile. Everyone in the movie is sarcastic. It's good for a chuckle or two.
The movie characters can't fathom why a 30-foot saltwater crocodile would be living in a cold lake in Maine because salties are warm water animals. But who knows? Salties in Australia and Indonesia get past 20 feet, live to a hundred years, and swim across oceans. As evolutionary survivors crocs have been around as long as the dinosaurs, having endured cataclysms that killed off the dinosaurs and later cataclysms that killed off large prehistoric mammals such as woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers. Maybe Betty White wasn't rooting for the losing side.
Reviewed by David Sunga July 26, 1999
Copyright © 1999 by David Sunga This review and others like it can be found at THE CRITIC ZOO: http://www.criticzoo.com email: zookeeper@criticzoo.com
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews