Lake Placid 3

In Aroostook County, in Maine, the boy Connor (Jordan Grehs) fells lonely and neglected by his father, the zoologist Nathan Bickerman (Colin Ferguson), who is only interested in elks, and by his greedy mother, the real estate agent Susan (Kirsty Mitchell), who is interested in her sales commissions only. So the boy spends his time feeding crocodiles in the Black Lake with shoplifted meat for months. When the reptiles are huge, they leave the lake and attack hikers and people that are camping nearby the lake to eat.

"Lake Placid 3" is so stupid and lame that can be defined in one word: awful. The beginning is very funny, with the young couple having sex in the bank of the river, but that is all. The story is so ridiculous that it is impossible that an adult has written such silliness. The acting is terrible, highlighting the decadent Yancy Butler and her grimaces. And the CGI is among the poorest I have ever seen. My vote is one (awful).

Title (Brazil): "Pânico no Lago 3" ("Panic in the Lake 3")

Truth be told, I didn't even know there was a 2nd and 3rd movie to the "Lake Placid" movie, so I just came over the third movie by coincidence. So I sat down and watched it.

And then the terror began...

Oh. My. God! The CGI effects in this movie were so unbelievably poor. The crocodiles were among the crappiest CGI creatures I have seen in a long, long time. The intentions were good, but the effects were so lousy.

As for the story? Well nothing much to be expected here. You have a pretty basic "let's make a sequel" movie here. Local people and animals being eaten by monstrously big crocodiles, and a gun happy hunter is brought into the fray. And a family with troubles that somehow manages to save the day. It is all here. And it has all been seen before.

The acting, well it was wholeheartedly attempted, and actually most weren't too shabby. Some were questionable to say the least. But, of course, this is not an award winning movie, just another SyFy flick.

I managed to sit through it, but I was so tempted to get up and find something else. Which I should have done. This movie is not really entertaining, it is in the line of being ridiculous. But generally I sit through a movie once I started it. I think you have to be a really, REALLY hardcore fan of the first "Placid Lake" movie to actually fully enjoy this movie.

Well, at least it was an attempt at making a movie with giant crocodiles, it just didn't work out all that well. This is not a good choice to put on if you want to be entertained by a good wholesome movie with giant creatures. There are lots of other (and better) movies out there.

Okay, seriously, if you really think that they wouldn't have massive monitoring of this lake after the first two "Killer Croc" attacks in Maine, but somehow, everyone just ignored the problem and THIRD set of killer crocodiles appear in this lake, and start eating people.

This is a fine production by SyFy, which means that you are going to get CGI monsters eating out of work actors...

We get to see some T&A for the video version, not sure how SyFy handled this nor do I care, really.

Okay, the plot is the Nephew of the Cloris Leachman character in the second sequel (who replaced that actually interesting Betty White character in the original) goes to clean out her cabin, and apparently this town that suffered two devastating attacks by Crocs is just find that a sheriff with a fish-finder has declared the lake Croc-Free.

The kid of the Zoologist nephew then proceeds to feed the crocs, who then go on to feed on annoying, uninteresting characters you don't care about.

Some people apparently haven't figured out that Black Lake in Aroostook County, Maine (known to us as Lake Placid) is a place to avoid if you don't like alligators coming on shore and attacking you. This time we have a family, a group of big game hunters, and some wandering college kids. Their paths will cross, some will die, and hopefully nobody watches this film so they never, ever make a "Lake Placid 4".

This film comes to us from director Griff Furst, who is better known, if he's even known at all, for having bit parts in movies (including the upcoming "Green Lantern" film), but not so much his directing. And also writer David Reed, who has never written a feature before... and judging from the complete lack of plot here, may never be asked to do so again.

The film is a "SyFy original" and it's very clear to the viewer, even if you didn't know that in advance. For one thing, it stars Colin Ferguson (Sheriff Carter from "Eureka") and even has him in uniform. I suspect they must have had him on contract to appear in a movie, or something like that... his career is not so terrible he needs this extra exposure. (When aired on the SyFy network, ads for "Eureka" did come on repeatedly, so the cross-promotion is no secret.)

For some reason, this film is ranked higher than "Lake Placid 2" on the Internet Movie Database. I am hoping this is because the film is new and hasn't sunk yet, because there's no way that part two could be any worse than this. This movie had the worst CGI yet, even by SyFy standards. Seriously, folks, give your animators an extra week or an extra thousand dollars or something... if you're going to make your alligators look this fake, you're better off not making the movie at all.

The DVD adds little more to the film than the TV version. There are no special features, only a few added scenes of full frontal nudity, oral sex, and bouncing breasts. I am all for nudity in horror films, but that doesn't automatically make the film good. The press release calls it "steamy, sexy and gory". Gory, maybe, but even the sex parts aren't all that sexy.

There's really nothing redeeming about this film. Horrible effects, no plot, bland characters. The directing is fine, though nothing special (literally anybody could have done it). I can't think of any reason to see this film, no matter how much you may have enjoyed the first one. Maybe if you're a die-hard Colin Ferguson fan? Otherwise, change the channel or go outside and get some exercise.

I really enjoyed the first Lake Placcid. It wasn't the best film I've seen, but it had a good atmosphere, had good acting and a witty script. I hated the second film though mainly because of the waste of Cloris Leachman. So considering it was SyFy, I was expecting to hate this one more. But surprisingly, while nowhere near as good as the original, it does improve, if not by much, on the second. The two main improvements were the acting and story. Neither are great here, the story is formulaic and doesn't have that many scares and the acting is amateurish from the lesser-known names. However, at least unlike the second, which was like a vastly inferior carbon copy, there is an attempt to be more original, and in terms of acting while not on the levels of Brendan Gleeson and the like from the original there is a good performance from Michael Ironside, whereas the two big names of the second film(Leachman and John Schneider) were literally wasted. There is some good scenery also. However, the crocodile effects are the worst of the three, among the cheapest of any group of special effects I've seen in a while. And to make things worse, the crocs aren't well-utilised, their scenes are lacking in suspense and they are not menacing in the slightest. The script is hilariously cheesy, the editing is choppy and you'd be hard pressed to find a likable character in this movie. All in all, pretty bad but not awful like the second. 4/10 Bethany Cox