Lake Placid is one of those horror movies where once you’re introduced to the main cast, you can tell that there is no threat to any of them. Normally, that would take some of the thrills out of the plot. But the movie remains one of my guilty pleasures of a creature feature/when nature attacks style of horror.
The movie is from the mind of David E. Kelley who’s had more success in the realm of TV with shows like L.A. Law, Ally McBeal and The Practice. For a brief time in the latter half of the 1990s, he wrote and produced a few movies. Lake Placid was probably initially written when when Kelly was a young man trying like a lot of people to capitalize on the success of Jaws. He banged out a script about a killer giant crocodile and then to his dismay saw a movie made about a killer giant alligator named Alligator. So, he tossed the script in a drawer or folder where it sat for years as he went off and made his name on TV. His first produced script is the legal comedy-drama From the Hip from 1987 but I’m sure he had this idea rolling around in his head for a while.
When he began to win Emmys left and right for his TV shows, he probably found the script and dusted it off giving it a tune-up for modern audiences. Set in the Maine countryside on and around the fictional Black Lake, it involves a lot of different professionals dealing with a giant crocodile that is discovered. A Fish and Game officer, Walt Lawson (David Lewis) is bitten in half while scuba-diving in the lake as the local sheriff Hank Keough (Brendan Gleeson) watches and tries to save him.
Another Fish and Game officer Jack Wells (Bill Pullman) comes in to investigate along with an eccentric paleontologist Kelly Scott (Bridget Fonda) who immediately butts heads with Jack and Hank. Kelly doesn’t like being called “Ma’am” and is already upset over her supervisor/boyfriend, Kevin (Adam Arkin), having an affair with her friend/colleague Myra Okubo (Mariska Hargitay). They are joined by crocodile enthusiast Hector Cyr (Oliver Platt) who is also a mythology professor and wealthy as he flies in with his own helicopter.
They begin to notice a lot of body parts, both animal and human, and then they are nearly attacked by a bear that is eaten alive by the giant saltwater crocodile, which is 30 feet in length. And then they conclude that the nearby elderly woman, Delores Bickerman (Betty White), has been basically feeding the crocodile as a pet for years. This leads to a funny scene where the croc basically sits up right out of the water like a child waiting for mommy to feed it while Delores leads a cow to be its dinner. White was famous for her animal-rights activism so it’s kind of a joke on her as she has an apex predator as a pet but still killing another animal in the process.
Ironically, despite her stance on animal rights, White joked that her secret to long-life was not eating anything green. Ergo, she wasn’t a vegan or vegetarian. Unlike other famous animal rights activists like Sam Simon or Casey Kasem, White enjoyed eating meat. White also delivers the iconic line to the law enforcement who question her, “If I had a dick, this is where I’d tell you to suck it!”
The movie overall seems to take an approach that it’s the humans not the crocodile that are the bigger threat to the environment. The crocodile has been in the waters for years according to Delores who says it followed her late husband home one day while he was fishing. Yet, it seems to have left people alone for the most part on the lake devouring other wildlife including a moose. Only when a human is killed do the authorities get involved. But the crocodile only does what’s in its instinct as a natural predator.
Just recently, some people in North Carolina got in trouble for pulling bear cubs off a tree to take pictures with. Last year, people pulled a dolphin out of the waters to take pictures. It later died. There is very little violence and gore in this movie which is about a step up from what you’d see on a CSI episode. I don’t know the personal beliefs of either Kelley or director Steve Miner, but I find it hilarious that people keep getting attacked when they put themselves in the crocodile’s environment. Aside from the bear attack, the crocodile never seems to get out of the waters much. It’s like the joke Siskel and Ebert said on their show about Jaws: The Revenge about how the Lorraine Gary character should just move to the Mid-West where there are no sharks around for hundreds of miles.
Even with a small run time of 82 minutes with credits, the crocodile appears less than four minutes on screen altogether. The foolish thing is the humans get snared in traps they themselves have set up. And they all butt heads as their egos and personalities interfere with each other. While Platt seems to do his normal schtick for comedic effect, Fonda herself hams it up in a way that really shows how missed she is after retiring from acting. Gleeson plays up the gruff sheriff archetype and Pullman shows he can play more than the normal everyman roles he was getting during this time. Jack is really nothing more than Ranger Smith with a firearm but pretends he’s a more important authority like Hank.
Despite being set in Maine, the movie was filmed in British Columbia. Weather problems delayed the production which allowed Miner to direct Halloween H20. Mixing CGI with animatronics, Stan Winston and his company designed the giant crocodile, which is revealed to be an Asian saltwater crocodile. How it came to live in a Maine lake is never really explained.
Lake Placid came at the end of what was considered a short period of high-scale creature features including Anaconda, Deep Blue Sea, Deep Rising, Mimic and The Relic in which big name actors dealt with deadly giant animals. There’s too much camp comedy and not enough thrills in this one. Kelley and Miner never take it to the extreme. A tense scene in which Cyr finds himself almost nose to nose in the water is well played and directed for a movie like this.
But like I said, Pullman, Fonda, Gleeson, Platt, White and even Meredith Salender as one of the sheriff deputies are just too likeable to end up crocodile chow. It doesn’t have the guts the above-mentioned movies have where when a character buys it as in what happens to Jon Voight in Anaconda or Samuel L. Jackson in Deep Blue Sea, it’s memorable and even comical. I give the filmmakers credit for not punking out and making this PG-13 which is would’ve been had it been made in the 2010s.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 