Lake Placid 2

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the video store, Lake Placid 2 arrives, with more giant prehistoric crocodiles, bad acting and sub-standard special effects than ever before. For people who missed the original back in 1999, consider yourself lucky. The story, or what passes for story in a low-budget, straight-to-video release, picks up several years after the events of the first movie, with the townspeople of Lake Placid blissfully unaware that their lake has been harbouring huge crocodiles from before the dawn of time. When the crocs begin eating people, Sheriff Riley (John Schneider) takes action, along with his forestry department ex-girlfriend, a research scientist studying the lake, a billionaire big-game hunter and the big-game hunter's faithful racial stereotype, uh, I mean, faithful African hunting guide. The team must hunt down the giant reptiles before they spawn a new generation of crocodiles that can somehow survive in Maine’s northern climate. Even when compared to other movies in the "when overgrown creatures attack” genre, which is mostly populated by low-budget productions, Lake Placid 2 is bottom of the barrel. The action is dull, the script is absurd and the special effects sit in the terrible netherworld between not so good and so-bad-they’re-funny. The special features are worse than the special effects, with a poorly edited clip reel shot during the making of the film, a "How to Survive a Crocodile Attack” feature that’s more painful to watch than it would be to be eaten by one, and the "Gnawed Up” version of the film, which just fast forwards to the "good parts” (i.e., blood and boobies) for those too lazy to do it for themselves. The film world has been pumping out giant creature movies since the original King Kong in 1933, so there’s no excuse as to why we must suffer with sub-par additions to this genre. It’s not necessary to have the best special effects or the greatest actors in the world to make a giant creature movie work — the genre has always set the bar low. But instead of making the small effort to jump over the bar, Lake Placid 2 crawls under it.