Lake Placid (1999)
Directed by Steve Miner
When a man is eaten alive by an unknown creature, the local Game Warden teams up with a paleontologist from New York to find the beast. Add to the mix an eccentric philanthropist with a penchant for "Crocs", and here we go! This quiet, remote lake is suddenly the focus of an intense search for a crocodile with a taste for live animals...and people!
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What critics compared Lake Placid to
It’s neither Jaws-scary nor Tremors-funny, but genre-movie fans in 1999 did have a chance to feast on the year’s talkiest, most neurotic horror movie.
Nor is it fun and campy like "Tremors," the 1990 film that featured desert burrowing creatures that kept most of its cast on top of rocks, vehicles and buildings.
But it's a dumb, forced attempt at camp horror that falls woefully far short of such films as Tremors and An American Werewolf in London.
Lake Placid doesn't have the scares of Alien, nor the high-mindedness of Jurassic Park, but it is as goofy and fun as Tremors or Anaconda.
Lake Placid is a tart comedy of human folly layered atop a nonsensical horror-thriller -- à la Tremors or Piranha.
I believe it was Wes Craven who first had the brilliant idea to combine horror and comedy with A Nightmare on Elm Street back in 1984.
Once the cat's out of the bag — or the shark's out of the trench, take your pick — the colossal creature is impressive for its sheer size, like the king-size monsters in the like-minded "Anaconda" and "Lake Placid."
This should be a bloody schlock-fest a la Lake Placid, but instead it’s a weirdly tame survival movie.
This is the era that gave us movies like Anaconda , Lake Placid , Deep Rising (check out our episode on that!), and Deep Blue Sea .
The Meg doesn’t even threaten the legacy of Lake Placid, much less Jaws.
They don’t have to be “good” in the narrative sense, but they should be thrilling as some of the best “escapist” movies revolve around bioengineered sharks (“Deep Blue Sea”), giant snakes (“Anaconda”) and crocodiles (“Lake Placid”).
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If Moonfall were funnier, satirical and campy in tone, it could've been as fun and entertaining as Lake Placid or the recent end-of-the-world satire, Don't Look Up.
Among these is a sequence in which a pile of crocodiles go berserk, kicking off the plagues by turning the Nile into Lake Placid.
Slither calls to mind Tremors , Twin Peaks and Lake Placid as much as Night of the Living Dead .