LAKE PLACID: LEGACY (2018)

Studio:      Syfy
Director:    Darrell Roodt
Writer:      Jonathan Lloyd Walker, Matt Venables, Jeremy Smith
Producer:  Lance Samuels
Stars:     Katherine Barrell, Tim Rozon, Sai Bennett, Luke Newton, Craig Stein, Joe Pantoliano, Alisha Bailey, Maxim Baldry, Greg Kriek, Gavin Lee Gomes

Review Score:

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Summary:

Acting on a rival’s challenge, a team of young explorers travels to a remote island where they encounter a giant crocodile.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Seattle, WA – Investigative journalist Alice joins her environmental activist sister Jade and Jade’s fellow urban explorers Sam, Billy, and Spencer as they infiltrate Wenoco Corp. headquarters to hang a protest banner. Later, the group finds a video from Sam’s rival and former partner Dane challenging them to locate a remote island not found on a map.

Sam, Jade, Alice, Billy, and Spencer team up with local guides Pennie and Travis to escort them to the location. Pennie warns that the area is supposedly off limits due to a toxic chemical spill. Phony surveillance cameras and the lack of any radiation leads the others to believe someone created a cover story to hide something else.

The septet takes a motorized raft across a lake and begins exploring a forest. The group finds Dane’s destroyed campsite. They also find Dane’s cellphone, which contains a video where Dane mentions a man named Henderson before an unseen creature attacks him. Shortly thereafter, the group finds giant crocodile tracks and the mutilated torso of Dane’s partner Gomez suspended in a tree.

Everyone rushes back to the dock. The giant crocodile destroys the raft and kills Travis. Pennie falls into the water and breaks her leg, but Sam rescues her.

Following a tense confrontation between Pennie and Spencer over what happened, everyone hikes to an abandoned facility that they enter through an old mine tunnel. Sam, Jade, and Alice become separated from Billy, Spencer, and Pennie while using a rope to access a lower level. Billy, Spencer, and Pennie briefly encounter the crocodile.

Hoping to call for help by connecting his cellphone to a radio antenna at the dock, Billy returns to the lake with Spencer and Pennie. Sam, Jade, and Alice venture deeper into the facility where they find evidence that Pharmetta Corp. performed some sort of amphibian breeding experiments there.

Billy connects his phone at the dock, but is unable to maintain its signal. The crocodile attacks Spencer and pulls him away.

Knowing that the crocodile can detect the blood from her leg, Pennie forces Billy to go alone to a nearby communications tower to call for help on a shortwave radio. Pennie intentionally lures the crocodile back to the tunnel so Billy can escape. The crocodile kills Pennie.

Sam, Jade, and Alice find Dane. Dane takes the trio to Henderson, who is tied up, and explains that Henderson lied about who he really is and why he brought Dane to the island.

Sam frees Henderson. Henderson confesses that he worked for Pharmetta when they were splicing crocodile and prehistoric DNA for medical research. Henderson tells Sam, Jade, Alice, and Dane that a veterinarian brought one of the live specimens to Lake Placid, Maine. Before the vet left however, he devised a plan to give the other specimens a chance to survive being euthanized. The crocodile now pursuing them is the sole survivor from those experiments and Henderson came to harvest its DNA to continue the stem cell research.

From the communications tower, Billy contacts the group over the island’s intercom system. Sam, Jade, Alice, and Dane listen in horror as the crocodile kills Billy.

Henderson escapes while the others are distracted. Before going after the crocodile, Henderson floods the tunnel.

Sam, Jade, Alice, and Dane go after Henderson. Flooding forces everyone to swim and have another encounter with the crocodile.

The crocodile kills Dane. Henderson locates the crocodile’s lair, but it kills him too.

Sam reasons that the only way to escape is to kill the crocodile. Sam forces Jade and Alice to go on ahead while he stays behind to flood the underground chamber with gas. Sam lures the crocodile to him, but his flare fails to ignite. The crocodile kills Sam.

Jade and Alice escape outside. The crocodile corners Alice. Jade uses an earthmover to pin the crocodile before dousing it in gasoline. After getting her sister free, Jade ignites the gas. Jade and Alice flee as an explosion engulfs the crocodile.

Presuming they are safe, Jade and Alice start swimming away from the island. The crocodile is seen rising from the water before going after the women.

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Review:

I had never seen a “Lake Placid” movie prior to “Legacy,” not even David E. Kelley’s 1999 original. Normally, I wouldn’t break into a series with what is, remarkably, its sixth entry. But in doing nominal Wikipedia research on the franchise, I learned that of the 45 key characters across the half-dozen films, only two actors (Yancy Butler and Robert Englund) ever returned for a second sequel. The six flicks have also had six different directors and five different writers/writing teams.

In other words, “Lake Placid” doesn’t appear to be a property particularly concerned with continuity, either in front of or behind the camera. It seems safe to assume then, that familiarity with the preceding films has nearly no bearing on understanding or enjoying “Legacy,” and probably little bearing on any other “Lake Placid” movie for that matter.

Really, how complicated can one movie, or six movies, about a giant killer crocodile even be anyway? The answer, evidently, is “not very.”

The setup putting everyone in harm’s way this time around involves a quintet of environmental activists who accept a dare from a rival urban explorer to find a remote location strangely stricken from Google Maps. Two local guides claim a toxic spill made the area off limits. Phony security cameras and a suspicious lack of radiation suggest someone concocted a cover story to hide an even deadlier secret. Venturing deeper into the forested island for a look-see, the group spends the following hour and change facing off against a mutant croc in the water, among the trees, and throughout an abandoned underground research facility.

Only ten people appear across the entirety of “Lake Placid: Legacy,” making the movie an efficiently economical production in more ways than one. Joe Pantoliano features as the cast’s biggest name, although he doesn’t show up until almost a full hour has elapsed. After belching up remaining backstory bits, Pantoliano promptly disappears for most of the third act’s remainder until a brief return for his unceremonious end.

The other actors are collectively up to the task of having no more and no less enthusiasm than minimally required by Syfy Original standards for photogenic appeal first and character depth a distant second. Tim Rozon, who plays the group’s bearded leader, possesses a poor man’s Anson Mount quality that keeps onscreen charisma at a steady temperature. As sidekick Spencer, Craig Stein might be the only other semi-standout, and that’s because he plays his part with over-animation fit for a Farrelly Brothers comedy. As cartoonish as Stein gets, his exaggerated energy remains preferable to the 180-degree alternative of having zero personality at all.

The killer crocodile looks precisely like the seldom-seen CGI creation audiences have come to expect from such flicks. Some bad digital blood notwithstanding, post-production effects essentially shoot for par on this course of B-movie Muenster.

A giant crocodile trashing people, places, and things can only sustain a certain amount of suspense, perhaps explaining why “Lake Placid: Legacy” compensates for the scarcity of murderous monster mayhem with alternative opportunities for action. “Lake Placid: Legacy” hits it runtime quota by padding itself with scenes like rappelling down a subterranean shaft, swimming through flooded tunnels, futzing with communications equipment, and other contrived methods of dividing characters into increasingly smaller groups for subplot separation.

Made quickly yet competently, “Lake Placid: Legacy” basically fills the function of being a serviceable slot filler aiming squarely for a C+ grade. Writing openly acknowledges its clichéd construction, with one character muttering, “don’t go down the stairs, Horror Movie 101.” Dialogue later launches into exposition about why the lights work in a disused mine, telling us more about how the writers anticipated likely audience “wha huhs?” and tried getting a step ahead.

“Lake Placid: Legacy” gets three stars out of five for being a-ok for this sort of thing, with “this sort of thing” being made-for-mediocrity cable TV creature claptrap. At the very least, “Legacy” has pretty good production value for a mega-monster movie that premiered on Syfy, better than almost anything with “versus” or “-asaurus” in its title anyway.

Review Score: 60

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