Trip to the Lake

Lake Placid. From everything I'd heard about it, it seemed like your basic piece of crap monster film, perhaps only one notch above the weekly SciFi Channel (oh... excuse me... that's "SyFy" now) movie.

And yet, look at that cast! Bill Pullman, Bridget Fonda, Oliver Platt, Brendan Gleeson... Betty White!?! And the writer! David Kelley? Boston Legal, Ally McBeal, The Practice, Picket Fences, etc, etc David Kelley -- THAT David Kelley? This couldn't possibly be all bad, could it?

Indeed, it's not all bad. But neither does the movie really seem worthy of its pedigree. Or perhaps it's only all those people involved in the making of it that saved it from being one of the worst films made in 1999, I don't know.

I do know that this tale of a giant crocodile causing havoc in a New England lake is stacked to the rafters with all the cliché situations you find in these bad monster movies. And very few of them are twisted in interesting new ways (as, say, Jurassic Park did) -- it just seems to be a case of a lot of talented people deciding they wanted to just turn off their brains to make a mindless piece of crap.

But it's not quite crap, because the dialogue does have a witty pop to it. The actors take their various caricatures and almost turn them into characters. Bill Pullman as the unflappable outdoorsman, Bridget Fonda as the haughty scientist, Oliver Platt as the thrill-seeking adventurer, and Brendan Gleeson as the overwhelmed local sheriff... these are all incredibly stock characters, but they're all brought to life with just enough effort by the actors to make them likeable. And Betty White brings the house down as a batty old widow living in a cabin on the lake.

Watching this movie was just the weirdest little 80-minute experience. It's really awful, honestly, and yet kind of enjoyable. You feel yourself getting dumber, and yet the occasional line shows some razor sharp wit. I don't want to recommend the movie, and yet it wouldn't be a catastrophe if you found your way to it on your own.

I guess I'd call Lake Placid a C+. Bad shouldn't be this good.