Lake Placid 2 - Good Movie

[toyosben]

Got to see Lake Placid 2 and wrote up a review, see below.

----


Due to a state of recent disappearances, Deputy James Riley, (John Schneider) is confronted with evidence of something monstrous in the lake, forcing his ex-wife Emma Warner, (Sarah Lafleur) a Wildlife agent, to show up as well. Deciding to search around the lake, they find a giant crocodile that attacks their boat. When professional hunter Struthers, (Sam McMurray) shows up due to the rumors and sets up camp to hunt the crocodile, he stocks up for a war with the beast. While they're fighting, James' son Scott Riley, (Justin Ulrich) and his friend Kerri, (Alicia Ziegler) along with some of their friends soon find that not only are they also attacked by the crocodile, there's a small family of them living in the lake and who all decide to gang up on the two groups of survivors stranded on the lake. Finally realizing what they're up against, they decide to work together to stop their rampage before more fall victim to them.

The Good News: This was actually a pretty good creature feature. One of the best things is that it plays up the previous knowledge and manages to expand upon it. The end of the previous one set-up the fact that babies had been born, and this one here is where the children come back and strike out against intruders as adults. The constant mention of characters and situations being brought up simply tie the events together, and a rather decent attempt is made to make the constant interaction in the forest look similar, ensuring another small bit of continuity. That includes the next great feature, the different crocodiles. This is one of the few films that has several individuals of the threat for the characters to get around. Having four crocs to deal with is a pretty clever move, allowing it to drop the tiresome "invincible creature" motif and actually make some semblance of reality when they can kill off one of the creatures early on without making it seem like the characters are out of danger or the crocs are weak. That itself is a really great idea no matter what the angle played. Another really smart move is to make the existence of the creatures known fairly early in the film, as it does here, allowing for a lot of croc screen-time and playing in to the option of letting one of the other ones take over if one is killed option that it uses since there's more than one. With it being fairly obvious to the characters about twenty minutes or so into the film that there's something huge and vicious in the lake, and for this to be obvious to them is quite nice, as the search for them leads to some really great scenes. The search for the first croc on the lake is a nice action highlight, as the different tactics used to try to slow it down make some nice little action scenes in it. There's even a little back-and-forth as the croc puts up a valiant struggle and manages to take out several vehicles of the police force before being brought down when it seemed like it would've been the police force which had the upper hand. The assault on the campground is one of the highlights, as there's a lot of action with the first couple traps and the ensuing attack is nicely handled. It gets to it's parts, though, when it goes for the jungle attacks, as the assaults on the stranded campers comprise so many great scenes and moments that there's a lot to like in them. Handled with great skill and even allowing some creepy moments to come into play, these are simply great and really make the movie, along with the first lake capture, and make this a really worthy sequel.

The Bad News: There isn't a lot here that isn't to like. One of the only points is that, as usual, the crocodiles and the gore are completely CGI and don't look even the slightest bit real. It's not that they look off or unrealistic, as they look remarkably close to what they're supposed to be. It's simply the fact that the tone and appearance of the creatures are quite obviously not there. It's a bit distracting to see that the main threat of the film isn't there, and as it's so easily apparent of this, there's very little confusion about whether or not the effects are CGI or not. It's actually impossible to feel any threat of the crocs due to this state, which is just a common problem that so many similar films have. That the gore, which should've been a big highlight isn't that shocking or revolting because of the CGI aspects is another flaw, and just look fake, especially since the crocs have so much screen-time to get to see all the fake-ness of their design. Beyond these, this is an enjoyable film, but they will make it hard for some to get into the film.

The Final Verdict: While not up to the level of the first one, it's still a reasonably entertaining creature feature. The worse that can be said about it is that it's computer graphics are quite obviously fake, yet real creature feature fans won't mind this one bit and have some fun with it, so this is really only recommended to those kinds of viewers. All others shouldn't.

[gprunescaper]

Good writing. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed my Google News Reader. GP, RS GUIDE, RS-PL,,MS-MESOS, well, I love my site, let’s try our best together, size everyday, and think just do it, I can!