Lake Placid: The Final Chapter

(Poppy Lee Friar) who she wants to experience more life. Lt. Laughlin (Paul Nicholls) the Strapping Croc manager… I have no real idea what this guy actually does, but he does wear fatigue pants… is having trouble with his adult son Max (Benedict Smith) who doesn't love him anymore. The Sheriff and Laughlin are attracted to each other, but kept apart from their vocations, but love is simmering the air. During a dinner scene between the sheriff and Laughlin, with lit candles everywhere, these two were looking into each other eyes, with sad longing, for what had to be a chalkboard scratching eternity. JUST DO IT ALREADY! Dear lord… where are the crocodiles to eat these sumbitches!

There they go! In a series of completely ridiculous, inane, implausible, and unreasonable events, the tree hugger is behind the fence along with some poachers (?) including the crusty Mr. Jim (Robert Englund) and the bookworm daughter is behind the electrified fence along with her summer school trip crew. A bus full of kids and chaperones and no one noticed they were driving through a twelve foot electrified fence with signs that said 'Keep Out'. Admittedly these signs were on the wrong side of the fence. Max is also behind the fence because a croc grabbed him and he's dead now. Oh wait… no he's not. Apparently he's the one character in this movie the crocs were saving for a late night snack. And everybody else, including our beloved Reba, is behind the fence looking for them. Massive croc crunching shall ensue. Yay! Eat them All! Except Reba. Not that it matters because she obviously regenerates like a salamander.

'Lake Placid: The Final Chapter' was directed by Don Michael Paul whose last film was 'Who's Your Caddy' which at one point was #1 on the IMDB bottom 100. It has since fallen… or risen I imagine to #36. Just so you know I have seen well over 36 movies that are worse than that one so that's probably a slightly unjust rating. Regardless, they finally let my man back in the director's chair and he has created one of the most inane, stupidest and retarded, movies SyFy has ever aired, but it's also possesses some of the most dumb fun of any movie they have ever aired. In fact if it wasn't for the Lifetime TV melodrama, I'd almost call Lake Placid 4 a good movie… in a brain-dead cotton candy tooth decay kind of way… but characters looking into each other's eyes for what felt like hours on end kind of killed that opportunity.

But ignoring that for the moment, there were a couple of things that did make this movie watchable, such as some clever kills delivered by the incredibly violent crocodiles, which was also fun to observe, considering most of the characters in this movie were intensely annoying. This version of Lake Placid also largely eschewed the lousy CGI of the last movie, though it was there in spots, but instead went with the always preferred big ass crocodile head that we know was being held by some guy off camera. We choose that over bad CGI any day. We also had to deal with a preponderance of 'gatorvision' which was pretty lame, but if the choice is gatorvision or characters running from bad CGI, then bad CGI loses again. Other than the slowdowns for unwanted melodrama, the movie moved pretty quickly and of course the Yancy Butler Factor proved to be a winner yet again. And to that end we even have to complement the writing in this one, which is also a rarity in a SyFy Original because Yancy and a few other characters did get to utter some very memorable lines. The narrative was silly, but it is a movie about people running from crocs… again… even though everybody in Lake Placid should either be dead or should've long skipped out of town by now, but there was some goodness in there.

So ignore a guy sticking his hand through a 10,000 volt electrified fence to feed a turkey. Oh wait, he put that candy bar on a wood stick which is safe because wood is terrible conductor of electricity. Ignore a guy trying to escape a 50ft crocodile by out swimming it. Ignore the girl getting damn near bitten in half by a croc only to be seen sprinting like Marion Jones two scenes later. Ignore people leaving the dangerous confines of a fortified bus for the safety of the croc infested open woods. So much to ignore… but then again don't ignore any of that because this, and the YBF make this movie worth watching and I think in the DVD version there will be gratuitous titties. You just can't beat that.