Main cast: Bridget Fonda (Kelly Scott), Bill Pullman (Jack Wells), Oliver Platt (Hector Cyr), Brendan Gleeson (Sheriff Hank Keough), and Betty White (Delores Bickerman)
Director: Steve Miner
Hands up people who thinks crocodiles are scary. Me too. Now hands up who thinks crocodiles eating big bears and moose are interesting. Hmm. Some giant very big croc is eating up things in a rate far more than a normal croc would, including a beaver tracker. The local sheriff, blunt of so many sarcastic jokes, call in for help. Jack Wells from the Fish & Game Department is brought in, along with two of the most irritating characters the scriptwriter David E Kelley of Ally McBeal fame has ever created.
And I thought Ally McBeal was bad. Ally, at least, has some funny moments. In Lake Placid, Kelly is the whiniest, most obnoxious woman ever with permanent PMT (that’s premenstrual tension for you). This woman is sent to Maine because her boss, whom she was sleeping with, has just dumped her for her colleague and friend. She was creating an Ally McBeal-like atmosphere at her museum (she’s a paleontologist, maybe that’s why she’s grumpy – too many old bones in her closet), so the boss with good sense packs her off to the unwitting Sheriff Hank and his deputies. Those poor men never knew what plague hit them – lo, hear her whine about mosquitoes, sleeping in tents, and the general unhygienic conditions of the great wide outdoors. I’m surprised Hank didn’t shoot her after ten minutes in her company. I’m even more surprised a nice, roguish good-looking man like Jack would even give her a second thought. Oh, I forgot, she’s the heroine.
Her friend the psycho (yes, I think he’s mental, to paraphrase Hank) Hector, a mythology professor, is worse. He is more annoying than funny as he foolishly risks the lives of other people in his mad quest to swim with crocodiles. I really resent the stereotyping of science professors as either absent-minded or dour while humanities professors are madcaps. I resent that! How come there are no cranky people in the academia?
Oh yeah, the thrills. Not many, I’m afraid. I’ve stopped laughing after they brought on the cartoon severed toe – I started yawning after the initial fear of watching those swimmers swimming in croc-infested waters fade with yet another dumb thing Hector or Kelly said or did. Frankly, I didn’t care after all.
