Lake Placid: The Final Chapter

January 5, 2013

Sure…they say it’s the final chapter, but I don’t believe them for a fucking second. How many Friday the 13th movies were made after the fourth and Final Chapter? (SEVEN…or eight if you count the recent reboot.) How many Puppet Master movies have been released after the supposed fifth and Final Chapter? (Six!) Even the seventh and most recent Saw film bore the Final Chapter label…so far they haven’t put out another Saw, but we all know it’s just a matter of time…

The fourth and final chapter of Lake Placid is missing the crucial ingredient that made the first and second movies enjoyable. Badass old ladies. I’d argue that the first Lake Placid was the begininng of Betty White’s popularity rebirth. Her character was just a mean old crocodile-feeding bitch, but no one was expecting that from Betty White back in 1999. Cloris Leachman took over the mean old crocodile-feeding bitch role in the second film. No one is shocked to see Leachman in crazy roles – she is always entertaining. This film really could have used a mean old crocodile-feeding bitch as comic relief, because there wasn’t much comedy to be had. (I don’t know that there was a mean old crocodile-feeding bitch in the third movie either, because I haven’t seen it.)

Robert Englund was a small consolation prize in his role as the mean old crocodile-poaching relative of the mean old crocodile-feeding bitches. He was totally about to rape those swim team girls after he caught some crocodiles.

Yancy Butler is just a few years older than me, but she looks double that. She’s always had a deep voice, but now she sounds like Kathleen Turner in an iron lung. Cocaine is a helluva drug.

Although my kids seemed to enjoy it, this was a fairly shitty movie, even by SyFy standards. The ending made it clear that the crocodiles were NOT eradicated from Lake Placid, so I won’t be surprised at all if we get another sequel after this “final chapter.”