October 21st, 2010 - Lake Placid 3

Full disclosure; I never saw Lake Placid 2. So if there is something I'm missing, and this is actually the greatest film trilogy since the OT. Somehow I doubt it. This is not a good movie, which is nice because I'm been itching to sink my teeth into something like this for a week.

Stupid people live in a small town near a lake. In the lake is a bunch of very hungry crocodiles. Other stupider people are vacationing near the lake. And the stupidest person of them all has just hired a group of poachers (!) to help track his estranged girlfriend who happens to be with the vacationers. Bad things happen. Very poorly rendered bad things.

The effects in this movie are horrendous. Like, worst CG ever. The crocodiles looks pretty bad, but they do no fit into the environment at all. The shadows don't work, they don't interact with anything in the environment. Its like they dropped the crocs on top of the footage and decided they were done. It's ugly, and would be enough to sink the movie. Luckily they don't bear the full brunt of my annoyance.

The actors are all terrible. Even Michael Ironside, the most recognizable face here, is phoning it in. The dialogue is laughable and the characters themselves are all unlikable. There's no gore to speak of, and what is there is terrible CG red smears. The entire thing looks like it was shot on a Handycam and the entire thing feels lifeless. There are no scares, no thrills. It commits the gravest sin of bad movies. It's just plain boring.

To be fair though, the beginning is kind of alright. There is some really gratuitous nudity and a couple of moments that are so over the top, I got a little excited for what I was about to watch. No such luck, the movie never reaches that height again. No matter how low that height really was.

Lake Placid 3 is not the worst movie I've ever seen. It's not even the worst movie I've seen in the past month. It's pretty darn close though. And I have a feeling that one of this weekends movie's will easily supplant it. But don't take that to mean that it'll be okay if you watch it. It won't be. Don't support bad DTV horror, it just makes it worse for everyone.