Actress Yancy Butler returns to battle giant man-eating
crocodiles in Lake Placid: The Final
Chapter (2012). Having survived the
ordeal of her previous encounter at the infamous lake, Reba (Butler) is now
settled with Sheriff Giove (Elisabeth Rohm) with the protection of her town by
barricading the growing population of crocodiles from the rest of the world
with an electric fence. Reba would
rather just kill them all but it seems that they are now an endangered species
and protected from being hunted. This
does not stop big game hunter Jim Bickerman (Robert England) or his group of
men who plan to break into the barricaded area in order to steal the valuable
eggs of the crocodiles. When Bickerman’s
men accidentally leave the gate to the quarantined area open an school bus of
lost and unsuspecting teenagers find their way to the beach where they are the meal
of the day for a swarm of crocodiles starving for food.
It’s great to see Butler back as Reba as she has grown into
the roll with her no nonsense attitude towards her job of both protecting the
endangered crocodiles and wanting to kill them all. She has a lot of fun in the roll and every
time she’s on the screen she cracks and sizzles. Rohm is the more subdued of the two and isn’t
given as much room to have any fun but she does play the typical mother whose
daughter is one of the bus load of teenagers trapped behind enemy lines. It is England who truly outshines them all as
Bickerman a relative of Betty White’s Delores Bickerman from the original 1999
film (so a nice nod there). He is given
free rein to have as much fun as he can in a film that saddled with mediocre
CGI crocodile VFX.
The film is written by David Reed (who also wrote Part 3)
and directed by Don Michael Paul. This
is a film that knows it’s the fourth film in an ever going franchise of
diminishing results (and for those of you counting there is a Lake Placid Vs. Anaconda film on the
horizon for this year). This is not
meant to be a good film but I give it points for bringing in some impressive
stars and letting them have fun with the mediocre material because if they’re
having fun we’re all having fun (and if you make it into a drinking game it’s
even more fun).
No comments:
Post a Comment