25 Years of Lake Placid: The Killer Croc Franchise That Won’t Die

I have a soft spot for Steve Miner’s 1999 giant crocodile caper Lake Placid. Much like its monster movie rivals of that year, The Mummy and Deep Blue Sea, it’s endearingly cheesy at times, positively reeks of the 90s, and just about manages to balance CG and practical effects effectively.

Miner headed back to a lake once more, having helmed Friday the 13th, Part 2 and 3. This time, a different kind of hulking killer mutant emerged from the water. When a man gets eaten alive by a mystery creature, the local Game Warden and a paleontologist from New York team up to investigate what exactly made a snack of a human being. Yep, it’s a big croc with a big appetite.

The monstrous shenanigans are bolstered by comedy-inflected characters, including a foul-mouthed Betty White performance that goes a long way to explaining her resurgence in popularity going forward. 90s Everyman Bill Pullman does the job, with Oliver Platt and Brendan Gleeson providing sass and sarcasm (and a questionable accent in Gleeson’s case).

While it is a fun creature feature at the height of that particular renaissance for them, it is far less beloved than those I mentioned earlier. Yet somehow, the Big Croc series has risen from the murky depths far more often than either of those franchises in the years since.

Not that this is a good thing. The follow-ups to Lake Placid have been largely stapled to the name and concept, with little care given to the appeal of the original.

Lake Placid 2 bites off more than it can chew

It’s probably not the best indication of quality to debut a sequel eight years later on the SyFy channel, and unsurprisingly, 2007’s Lake Placid 2 is a below-par sequel. Taking the ”The original, but more” approach by having three man-eating crocs terrorize the titular lake. Unfortunately, that didn’t apply to anything else in the movie.

It has Sam McMurray of Raising Arizona and Drop Dead Gorgeous fame, so it’s at least a bit entertaining, but it wouldn’t have been all that surprising if the Lake Placid franchise went belly up at that point.

But no, in relatively quick time, Lake Placid 3 arrived in 2010, and introduced newcomers to Lake Placid who are aware of its bloody history, but assured it’s all fine now. Of course it soon stops being fine when a kid starts feeding baby crocs that become monstrous adults. Again, the quality had dipped, but somehow, it must have found footing because after this, there were more, and they connected events and characters from film to film.

2012 saw Lake Placid 3 star Yancy Butler (Kick Ass) return for Lake Placid: The Final Chapter, which, in true franchise tradition, was not the final chapter. Certainly, there’s no conviction in the film itself, as no stops are pulled out beyond a nice paycheck for Robert Englund. Good for him.

And still, Death did not come for Lake Placid. Instead, the croc collided with another 90s big, dangerous reptile franchise in Lake Placid vs. Anaconda. The 2015 crossover once again sees Yancy Butler return along with Robert Englund, and one might suspect that’s where most of the budget went as the series plunged to new depths of CG shonkiness in a dull, aimless battle of the beasts.

Croc tales go on

Surely that did it for Lake Placid? But no, a sixth entry arrived in 2018 with a reboot of sorts and an attempt to refresh the series’ legacy in… Lake Placid: Legacy.

The high points both come before actually watching the movie. It has Joe Pantoliano. I like Joe. And the poster design is genuinely great after several sub-Photoshop jobs. Then you watch Lake Placid: Legacy (maybe don’t, though), and low expectations are somehow not met.

If you wanted to play a drinking game with shots for every cliche line shoehorned into the narrative in an awkward, stilted fashion, you’d already be dead twice before you made it halfway through.

Maybe nature is healing, as it’s been six whole years since Lake Placid: Legacy. Maybe there’s a chance it could come back with a reboot that remembers what was fun about the concept. But I suspect the shonky CG beast Lake Placid has become is still out there, just waiting to eat up time, patience, and limbs in equal measure.

Neil Bolt

Neil became a horror fan from just a nightmare-inducing glimpse of the Ghoulies VHS cover and a book on how to draw ghosts. It escalated from there and now that's almost all he writes and talks about.