Lake Placid 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.

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")

Brazenly ridiculous. It has little to do with the self-satirical original Lake Placid, other than the name. For whatever reason, somebody thought the bargain-basement LP2 warranted a sequel, or a remake, or whatever. So there's yet another generation of these hungry chomping monsters.

Except for Michael Ironside as the quintessential skeptic hick sheriff, and the guy from Eureka poking fun at his Eureka character, the acting is laughably amateurish. The teen actors fare worst; when the girls scream, the shrill noise they emit sounds like an old Talking Tina doll with a broken speech mechanism. The laughable teen soap opera plot doesn't help the paper-thin throw-away characters, either. The knife-wielding nut wasn't bad, considering the outlandish cliché she got stuck with. Don't get me started on that latchkey kid and his weird problems. Throw-away characters have "gator meal" stamped on their heads at all times.

Could the director explain why the gators always grab people's shoes, and drag them for 20 minutes before they decide whether to kill them or not? Do they like to nibble on shoes?

Go in with a "laugh at dumb it is" MST3K attitude, and there'll be a few moments that will not disappoint.

Lake Placid 3 (2010)

* (out of 4)

The first two films in the series certainly weren't anything to write home about but at least they were cheap "B" movie fun. This one here managed to break into the mainstream press after it became the highest watched movie on the Sy-Fy channel but I'm really not sure what that says about those viewing. In this third installment we return to the lake where a new game warden (Colin Ferguson) takes over the house where the old ladies were feeding the crocs earlier. It turns out that his son starts feeding the baby crocodiles who grow into very big crocs and start eating people. Soon the family finds themselves trapped and having to fight them off. Again, there's no question that the first two films aren't going to make you forget the work of Martin Scorsese but at least they were entertaining, which, sadly, this third film isn't. Like countless other "nature" flicks from this channel, we're given very bad CGI monsters that look about as real as those things seen in MEGA SHARK VS GIANT OCTOPUS. Some might overlook this issue but I think it's very important that you can believe the monster in a film because if you don't then it's very hard to be scared by anything you're seeing. The movie doesn't have a single scene that makes you feel any tension and that's not good for something like this. The CGI is extremely poorly done as the crocs are so fake looking that you can never take them serious. It seems as if they change sizes and forms from one scene to the next and most of the time they appear very blurry for some reason. Another major problem is the screenplay itself, which offers up nothing new and we're not even given any characters that we can care about. The kid in the film is so stupid that you can't help but want to see him eaten early on and his mother isn't much better. I will admit that I thought Ferguson did a nice job in his role but he's not given much to do either. LAKE PLACID 3 was a hit so I'm sure another film will be on its way. It's a shame so many people watched something so cheap when there are many 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.