DVD REVIEW: LAKE PLACID 3

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AMAZON: CLICK

HERE
STUDIO: Sony Home Entertainment
MSRP: $24.98
RATED: Unrated
RUNNING
TIME: 94 Minutes
SPECIAL
FEATURES:

• Subtitles
• Trailers
• Interactive Menus
• No John Schneider

The Pitch

In addition to being maddeningly overexposed Betty White (in the first film) overfed and created a family of hateful crocodiles who have chomped their way from the multiplex to television sequels that shoot extra grue and nudity to provide for unrated DVDs.

The Humans

Director: G.E. Furst

Writer: David Reed

Cast: Colin Ferguson. Michael Ironside. Yancy Butler. Kacey Barnfield. Kristy Mitchell. Mark Evans. Nils Hognestad.

The
Lowdown

I find the original Lake Placid adorable. It’s filled with fun dialogue (“This is the second time I’ve been hit with a severed head and I DON’T LIKE IT!”) and really good work by most everyone involved. It’s a minor horror flick but not without its charms. I didn’t see the second one because it starred John Schneider and movies starring John Schneider when he was relevant were boiled asshole so I couldn’t imagine what to expect a full two decades after he stopped being relevant. The third film didn’t feature John Schneider, so when it arrived in our office for review I know it was time to step back onto the scaly bandwagon and see if this unlikely little franchise had legs.

Ron Kovic could outrun this franchise.

The story centers on the extended family of Betty White’s Mrs. Bickerman. She has shuffled off into the afterlife and they are packing her home (the home that she lived in as she fed husbands and cows to the first film’s marauders) for sale when the patriarch (the incredibly bland and presence-less Colin Ferguson, whom I hear is good on Eureka) decides they should live there on the beautiful lake and enjoy nature. He works in the area protecting the wildlife and figures it’ll be good for them, especially his son Connor, who has yet fully acclimated to his boring new stepmother (Kristy Mitchell, who is so effective at boring B.P. is sending her to the gulf).

There are flaws in Daddy’s plan:

• His son is a douchebag who listens to no one and risks the lives of everyone at every opportunity. Seriously, the little moppet feeds what is obviously dangerous [unless 1992 quality CGI doesn’t scare you] crocodiles in the early moments of the film and every step from there increasingly deserves to be a goner. He shoplifts! He must die!

• Dad protects the wildlife in a very specific way. By letting the animals get slaughtered. All the time. The elk population is getting jackhammered by toothy reptiles and all this man can do is carry a Radio Shack antenna around and wear short-sleeved button-down shirts.

• The lake he wants to live at is not the picturesque body of water from the first film but a muddy, shallow, and very ugly shitfountain. Seriously, this is the least photogenic lake I’ve ever seen onscreen and that includes Ricki Lake at her widest. Was there a monsoon before they filmed this and they just assumed no one would notice that this lake looked like Mother Nature’s phlegm?

• His crazy old relative didn’t just leave behind a log cabin that looks like it was build four minutes before the director yelled ‘action!’. She also left behind the worst CGI reptiles since Gex. The laws of physics mean nothing to these assholes. They defy the laws of size, fluctuating considerably. They defy the laws of motion, somehow pulling a character out of a car from an impossible angle late in the film. They defy the laws of spatial relation to their environment, sometimes seeming as someone didn’t even bother to modify the built-in models in whatever hacked software they were using to render them.

• Daddy calls Yancy Butler a cougar. I think the feline species is growing a dewclaw/thumb so they can hold a sign and picket in front of the production offices of Lake Placid 3. Yes I am aware that the sort of cougar he refers to doesn’t have fancy claws and the ability to meowler. She is closer to the four-legged and rabbit eviscerating kind of cougar, so my comment stands.
  

I should like Lake Placid 3, I really should. Though he’s become a much wider and larger shadow of himself, I will love Michael Ironside until the day his veins explode and his mind bursts from thoughtwaves. I love large reptiles who hate humans. I love naked young women with real breasts frolicking with naked young women with fake breasts, especially when I get to watch their asses bounce to the beat as they run into the water. These are things that make me a man, and one with a wide-eyed desire for more movies like this to exist. But I cannot like this movie, and that’s saying something because there are like twenty attack scenes in this one. There are so many crocodile attacks that they could have made Lake Placid 3-6.

But they are horrible attacks, and they often aren’t successful at generating tension or satisfying the more base needs. They aren’t fun. Or cool. Or believable. They just are attacks. Characters die. Blood squirts. We yawn.

This is not a guilty pleasure, because there has to be pleasure for that equation to work. There are some nice looking naked women. And some not so nice looking naked women. If all you need is naked women and crocodiles you should drill a hole in the ladies’ room near the reptile exhibit at your local zoo. You’ll be guiltier and you’ll get more pleasure.

Otherwise steer clear of this abomination.

The

Package

That there are no special features on this disc are a better case for the existence of a supreme being than any Psalm could ever aspire to.

3.0
out of 10