After cutting his teeth on the second and third installments of the Friday the 13th saga before rightfully descending into the depths of television direction, Steve Miner resurfaced (sorry) to make Lake Placid, a wry B-movie, replete with a 30-foot crocodile, cozily nuzzled in Maine as Sheriff Hank Keough (Brendan Gleeson) sets the tone of the film with the question, “Is that, like, sarcastic?”
Unfortunately, not everyone understood Keough’s tongue-in-cheek query to be rhetorical. As Bridget Fonda’s character, Kelly Scott, forthrightly intones, “I’m not real great with subtlety,” it seems that there are those that can only be reached via metaphor and symbolism. Both Roger Ebert and James Berardinelli hated the film, and for all the reasons they should: Miner doesn’t set out to make a film per se, but a fun movie, the adjective of the latter being key. Far be it for the Chicago critic to find the humor in the production’s title clashing with the locale’s name (Black Lake), in lieu of the fact, beginning with the first frame, that we are firmly lodged in a B-movie romp while the latter critic espouses disgust at the thought that humans do exactly what would get them in trouble when faced with a potential dilemma. Hmmm . . . it’s moments like this when you wonder if Jimmy was the guy in the back of British Lit asking if “this Swift fellow” was serious about the English eating the Irish . . . . (If head-slapping is your game, there’s more of the same from both factions and, for the migraine-prone sadists out there, watch the film and then get ready, because your S & M dreams are just a click away . . . .)
I mean, seriously. What else can you expect from a film where the likes of someone like Oliver Platt is offered sex from Meredith Salenger, whom he turns down in favor of a 30-foot reptile who wants him for lunch? (And she even musters the offer with Platt in a wetsuit nonetheless . . . .)
Lake Placid is a joy to behold for anyone that can revel in both Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog and Ed Wood’s canon in that we are granted a horror comedy with intentionally one-dimensional and overly eccentric characterization, played to a pitch-perfect camp by all (if Henry got his panties in a wad over Jane Fonda’s part in Barbarella, he’s undoubtedly rolling over in his grave in regards to his granddaughter’s work); a pithy B-movie premise; countless arbitrary “boo moments”; the man who saved the world from an apocalyptic alien invasion issuing the go ahead to teabag a confiscated cow (under the ruse of Eminent Domain no less) in a lake via helicopter; unrepentant Twinkie consumption; Bridget–in a rare reprieve from much screaming–giving Bill Pullman a bandage (which he, natch, courteously thanks her for); a crocodile receiving medical attention (complete with big bandages); an on-again, off-again love/hate relationship between Platt and Gleeson; all amid hokey, overly sentimental one-liners sardonically posing as cinema gold from our leads while Betty White burns our ears with such unforgettable quips as “If I had a dick, this is where I’d tell you to suck it.”
Feel free to pick your jaw up off the floor.
No, I’m not making this up.
And no, Ebert apparently didn’t find this humorous either.
In short, Steve Miner’s Lake Placid is deliberately hyperactive, clichéd modern day B-movie burlesque at its guilty pleasure, black humor best for anyone who can suspend one’s disbelief that an Asian crocodile made it all the way to Maine without demanding the requisite explanation (I guess it would be a moot point to highlight the fact that the same amount of “Look the Other Way” is required three-quarters of the way through Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs when it is implied that Hannibal Lecter successfully confiscated that pen . . . ). Granted, just as a potentially relevant idea is offered, Miner and Co. shift gears, thereby giving the cinema stiffs what irritates them most: celluloid having fun at its own expense, as well as its audience’s, but nonetheless letting everyone in on the gag, leaving Pullman’s statement, “He’s half alive! Shoot him!” as a poignantly metaphorical jab toward party poopers like, well, a-hem, you know.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
