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The Appropriate Tune - "Crocodile Rock", by Elton John
Humanity has been menaced by a lot of big things across cinematic history. Giant ants, giant grasshoppers, giant rabbits, giant women (though some might find that less menacing than others and so on and on. Occasionally the giant thing is even something that was already pretty dangerous to begin with. Like remember The Meg? The one where Jason Statham plays Jason Statham fighting a giant shark? Or Meg 2: The Trench, where Jason Statham plays Jason Statham fighting a giant shark, again? You might as well show Jaws to your five year old, no one is gonna be scared of some normal ass fish anymore.
Enter Lake Placid. Bridget Fonda stars as Kelly Scott, a New York paleontologist who, after an awkward situation with her boss/ex, is sent to Maine to study a tooth found in the half of a diver dragged out of a very placid lake. The result? Crocodile, but who ever heard of a crocodile setting up camp in Maine. So Kelly joins up with Fish & Game Warden Jack Wells (Bill Pullman), local sheriff Hank (Brendan Gleeson) and eccentric mythology professor Hector (Oliver Platt) to locate and take down this beast. As long as it’s a regular sized crocodile and not some kind of huge super croc, I think everything will turn out all right.
If I were some kind of weirdo who grouped movies into lists and I needed entries for ‘popcorn horror movies’, then you’d definitely see Lake Placid in a prominent. Not in the derogatory way that the term often implies, but in the way that it is a very accessible horror film. There’s gore but not excessively so, there’s suspenseful moments and more action-packed thrills, there’s some explosions, it’s funny, just a little bit of everything that builds up to a solid picture. The kind of movie that you’d pick during movie night when no one can agree on something and everyone ends up having a great time. Well, the kids might be a bit traumatized seeing a dude’s head get bitten off, but hey, they might be better off in the long run.
And yeah, Lake Placid is pretty funny. Not in the gross out humor way, like in that plague of Scary Movies that infested the 00’s, it’s just well-written with good actors bouncing off each other. It’s also hard not to love seeing the late Betty White calling a cop ‘Officer Fuckmeat’, just an atomic blast of a line that comes out of the blue. And importantly, these bits of levity don’t undercut the tension that the film has built. When these people are in danger they behave like it, they just have the ability to crack jokes about it if they survive.
If there’s any nits that really need picking, I suppose it’s the CGI. Lake Placid has scenes using a crocodile model (done by Stan Winston’s studio), and ones that use a CG croc. The crocodile model looks fantastic, the CGI looks like CGI. Not bad CGI really, there are certainly worse examples of it in 1999, but it’s there. That being said, the big danger in CG is overexposing your monster, allowing the audience to recognize its artificiality and breaking the suspension of disbelief, and I don’t think Placid reaches that point. I don’t know if Miner is following the Jaws mindset, but I think the balance he ended up with works out.
As I said, if you’re looking for a fun evening, maybe you’ve got a few friends and a few beers, then you’re going to be okay with throwing Lake Placid on the screen. It’s got that Jurassic Park everyman quality. If you’re looking for sterner stuff, then this probably won’t satisfy. And avoid the sequels. I haven’t seen any of them, but it’s a horror movie franchise man, if you’re trying to find a good sequel you might as well test your luck panning for gold instead.
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