The first Lake Placid was a major studio film with A list actors that sort of underperformed at the box office, despite good, quirky fun.
A few years later Lake Placid 2 came out as a direct to video low budget B-list affair that was a solid and quirky film as well. I enjoyed both movies very much so I was a bit stoked for the third installment. But I suppose all good runs have to come to an end.
Lake Placid 3 holds very little of the charm of the first two, and really suffers from lack of focus, focus on the wrong things, and just general laziness.
The second film worked based on a couple of things. Get solid character actors, get a tight script with some tits, murder, and humor, and stay focused.
Here we have a cauldron of story lines and too many characters, most of which aren't engaging in the slightest.
First we have Craig Ferguson as the nephew of Sadie, the old lady who fed the crocs in the sequel. He's an EPA dude, who along with his wife and kid are cleaning out Sadies cabin. Seems she was eaten by crocs between films. Anyway, he's good enough, but the kid is annoying and gets too much of the focus early in the film. You know the scene where the kid has something important to tell the adult but instead of letting him finish they tell him to shut up, so he just sulks off? Well that scene happens much too early this movie. It just plays as a badly acted, drawn out story mechanism that's more annoying than anything else.
Next we have a group of college kids, except they can't just be college kids, they have to have their own back story as well. Seems that one of the couples isn't really a couple but rather a dude who lied to a chick about her boyfriend cheating on her so she would come with him to a fucking lake. That's fine enough but it leads into another group of grating characters. Seems the girls boyfriend is trying to find her so he hires Yancy Butler, playing a hunting guide or Rambo with tits, in A most dreadful performance, to take him out to the lake. Just a contrived and unnecessary plot. And the acting between the two is akin to a coke can up your ass.
Oh, Michael Ironside, an actual good actor is also in the movie, but is given very little to do.
Besides the hackneyed script, bad acting, and plot that gets way too fucking tedious for a movie about killer crocs, we have our last and maybe biggest problem.
In the second movie the CGI was kept to a minimum and the crocs were mostly seen for a few seconds at a time in the water. Here we are treated to way too many scenes of crocs on land, horrifically digitized, killing and chasing people and things. It looks ridiculous, and really takes all the drama and fun out of things. It's like instead of trying to hide the limited capabilities the film makers had, they decided to make them a focal point. Really fucking agitating.
So yeah, convoluted setup leads us to a convoluted conclusion. Everyone is kind of trapped in the cabin. I say kind of because one moment they can't go anywhere, and the next they just decide they can. People come in and out of the movie, get killed, go missing, whatever. The group that is left somehow trek from the cabin into town. But when they get into town, a town mind you, full of.......ya know, people, they still act as if they're all alone. They bang on a shop door in the middle of the night and when they get no reply they decide the best thing to do is break into a supermarket. This movie was always pretty stupid, now it's downright insulting. Of course the crocs have followed them over who knows how many miles to the supermarket. Jesus Christ.
Lake Placid 3 takes nothing from it's better predecessors and instead is content to be a brutally dumb, badly acted turd. The best thing I can say about it is that it has some quality nudity and hot bitches wearing very little clothes.
After two good stays, I'd be happy if my third trip to Lake Placid was my last.
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