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Tuesday, July 10, 2012

REVIEW: Lake Placid 3 (2010)

It’s summertime again and the sun is out and the water is cool. Now everyone can relax and go outside and---wait, what do you mean there’s a debilitating heat wave afflicting the whole country? Well, shit. I guess I’ll just have to sit at home and review another stupid movie about a crocodile, because that’s all I got in the summertime. This is Lake Placid 3, a movie about a lakeside Northeastern town afflicted by a terrible wave of CGI alien crocodile attacks that will rock the town to its very core…actually, nah, it’s just kinda silly.

Director: Griff Furst
Starring: Colin Ferguson, Yancy Butler

Yes, Lake Placid, that immortal and long-standing epic series about killer crocs and…well, not much else except idiots who go out onto the lake and get munched on. It’s a perfect series for a summertime drinking session with your friends, although unfortunately I will be completely sober in reviewing this turkey…but I will be done with this series forever, for real, after this, so there is that to look forward to!

This movie starts out with something completely original by having two kids hitching a ride with some guy in the back of his truck. They get out and the guy says it’s a bad idea because they might get lost and horribly killed…because he read the script, I guess. Then we see where all the money for this movie that was supposed to be used on the CGI went – getting this chick to strip for the camera:

Doesn't she have nice hair? I think so.

They have sex in the mud and he starts to get bitten by the crocs under the water, a fact which this clear genius of a girl does not notice at all, because your boyfriend's "OH MY GOD I'M BEING EATEN" face is exactly the same as his "orgasm" face...good to know! They both get killed off because I guess the director's "pay them to have sex" fund ran out too early. Yay for opening kill morons!

After that we see some family looking at the lake house where Betty White lived in the first movie – WHAT, CONTINUITY? Oh, it doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of the movie at all? Phew. Saved again by bad sequel clichés. We almost had a real story there! They talk about selling it, but decide to wait until the housing market gets better – HA HA HA! So hilarious!

But I digress. We then fast forward two years for absolutely no reason. I mean seriously, what purpose does this serve? I mean other than to fit in with the timeline of the other movies, being that it wouldn’t make sense for this to happen right after the first movie when the second one is in between the two. Wait, what is this? Why am I trying to rationalize things in this movie?!

The family from before is exactly the same except now the kid has longer hair and looks like the illegitimate child of Carrot Top. The dad is a forest ranger who wants to stop people from hunting elk and the mom is a real estate agent, and they both leave their son with this chick who I swear just walked off the set of a bad satire-comedy like White Chicks or something, and she even has a stupid little Chihuahua dog she carries around with her while she smokes cigarettes inside and screams at Spanish soap operas. So it’s really no surprise that the kid likes to run off and go feed crocodiles:

Just like his great-aunt Betty White, it runs in the family.

He runs out of meat and gets caught shoplifting from the supermarket because he was trying to steal more to feed to them. I mean seriously, I know he’s just a bored little kid but come on, you’re telling me he has NOTHING BETTER TO DO than feed crocodiles? Maybe he should try buying ghosts on the internet. That’s a real kids’ hobby that’s all the rage these days!

Eugh...even seeing this again makes me feel unclean...remind me never to reference this movie again in any review ever again.

Anyway, we get some story about how these dumb college kids are wandering around in the woods trying to go camping. They pretty much have no personalities except for the fat perverted kid who does nothing but hit on the blonde girl even though she shows absolutely no interest in him…lovely to have such realistic characters. They all meet up with the dad and the sheriff, who is played by Michael Ironside, and actually seems more awake in this than he did in Highlander 2…that’s pretty hilarious.

"Hey, I'm a real actor. Don't you patronize."

The kids all go and jump in the water with bikinis on and we see more of the director’s personal funds in action:

Bikini Girls on Ice had more dignity.

And let’s take a look at some of that great character buildin’ dialogue:

TARA: I don’t think he’s I’d have sex with him funny, just I’d set him up with one of my fat friends funny.

Right, I think that’s enough – because people who are fat automatically have lower standards and deserve people worse than everyone else! Lake Placid 3 is just so smarty-smart-smart.

After that the fat asshole who was taking pics of them while they were changing gets eaten by a crocodile as punishment; oh yeah. Ellie walks around with this other dude Aaron and they mostly exchange putrid dialogue that amounts to this:

AARON: Have sex with me!
ELLIE: No, I want to find my friends who are missing!
AARON: …Have sex with me!

Blegh. Anyway, did I not mention the THIRD story going on here? Because you can never have too many plots in a Lake Placid movie. This one involves Yancy Butler playing a woman named Reba, who takes people on hunting trips for money. She’s teaming up with a bunch of rednecks and a college kid named Brett, who wants to find his girlfriend who’s apparently out in the woods somewhere. It turns out the girlfriend is Ellie from before, who apparently thought he was cheating on her and so just went off with some other guy without even talking to him. Real catch, she is.

Ugh, this is boring - let's see some good ol' croc head-eatin' action the way only Lake Placid can do it:

There's no way it would be that clean of a bite in real life and it looks really cheap - yup, this sure is a Lake Placid kill!

Brett starts to shout Ellie’s name at the top of his lungs, not realizing that it could probably attract crocs, which it does! One of them gets Butler herself and begins to drag her away, so he shoots at it and somehow only hits her, because a huge crocodile is really difficult to aim at I guess…and afterwards, despite being shot and bitten by a croc, Butler is able to walk around perfectly fine! Oh. Well she does limp a little and has her teeth constantly gritted. So I guess it’s realistic…

Yancy Butler: she can take a lot of shit.

At the house, same thing again as the dad and Michael Ironside the sheriff get caught in their car while trying to escape, as a croc relentlessly attacks them! The mom for some reason can't hit the thing even though she's like six feet away and it's the size of a small car...


...so she does the sensible thing and whips out a friggin' chainsaw!


That's awesome, you gotta admit. Even if she does screw up and end up dropping it...shut up, let me enjoy this!

So somehow Yancy Butler and Brett get into a discussion about their love lives when he accuses her of not knowing about a normal love life because she doesn’t want to go off all gonzo-style into the woods at night with killer crocs running around JUST to save his girlfriend when they don’t really know where she is! Butler promptly replies by shouting at him and putting him in his rightful place – okay, this chick is seriously the best thing in any Lake Placid movie. She’s totally a badass!

They all end up in the Betty White cabin and Brett pulls a gun on them to go out and find Ellie, which he does:

This was the film's true point, a love story between estranged boyfriend and girlfriend...how romantic.

Unfortunately for Romeo and Juliet here, death is right around the corner as a croc unceremoniously finishes Brett off. And I don’t think anyone cares, sooooo…moving on. The surviving cast drives into town to escape the crocs and for some reason decide to hide in the grocery store, where the crocs find them just a few seconds later of course. Why not just leave town? However it does result in a grocery store themed horror scene, featuring crocodiles running through the store aisles and knocking shit over, that's still better than The Mist.

The finale is honestly the best part of the film, featuring the dad actually INSERTING HIS CREDIT CARD into a gas pump to buy gas, then spraying the croc with it while his son pulls out a lighter so they can light the damn thing on fire! That. Is. AWESOME.

Credit card ACTION! Go!
I love that it shows the gas price and gallons going up like it would with a car, while it's in the croc's mouth. This has got to be the BEST way to kill off a killer croc I've ever seen.

What would they do if the kid didn’t have that lighter, which he got from the babysitter at the beginning? I don’t know. BUT WHO CARES? This was a great finale to a silly, silly movie. Sure, most of it kind of dragged, but it was so stupid it was endearing, despite a few really shitty characters here and there. And man, am I ever glad I am done with these Lake Placid movies! I just don’t know how much more I could take! But I’m glad to finally say that I’m done wi----


……….


No images, videos or crocodiles in this post belong to me. They are all copyright of their original owners.

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