Crocodile (2000) Review

WEEK 4: WHAT A CROC 

Crocodile (2000) Review

Most movie buffs recall their first R-rated movie experience, and regardless of the movie’s actual quality, the experience is usually awesome. Mine reminds me of Emma Stone’s character in Zombieland. She makes a comment that her first R-rated flick was Anaconda (check out my review from week 2 if you haven’t yet), and the fact that it was R-rated makes it awesome enough; the quality of the film matters little. Crocodile holds the distinct honour of being the first R-rated film I ever watched, and twelve years later, I’m re-visiting this killer creature feature. I think this movie might be part of the reason low-budget killer animal films are an odd passion of mine.

A group of colourful college students go to a swampy lake for a spring break getaway on a tiny houseboat. One of the girls shows her bare ass to the camera before the opening credits even conclude: a clear indicator of what audience is being targeted. Before I go any further with the plot summary, I have to comment on both the lake and the houseboat. The lake is one of the nastiest looking lakes I’ve ever seen in one of these animal amok movies. I don’t know where they filmed this movie, but I think they used at least three different locations, because there are aerial shots where the lake looks long and deep and surrounded by pine trees, then there are shots on the lake where it looks fairly sparse with trees and the water’s murky, and then when it’s close to shore (which is most of the time), it looks like a desert, with dusty shores, cactuses, green water no more than knee-deep, and more mud than water! It’s wildly inconsistent, but I’m just going to assume it’s a very large lake spanning multiple sub-environments. As for the houseboat, it has to be the smallest houseboat I’ve ever seen. There’s one room and a deck above. That’s it. It’s an insignificant detail, but it just stood out to me as being very peculiar.

Going back to the characters, there’s a bunch of B.S. drama they’re all caught up in that no viewer is going to give a crap about. Main character Brady is with this girl, but another girl in the group likes him, and his so-called best friend wants to do it with his girlfriend to get back at him, blah, blah, blah, but soon none of that matters, because the teens discover a nest of very large eggs, prompting one of them to recall a local legend about an eccentric billionaire who imported a crocodile many decades ago, and the crocodile, now giant, still hunts the shores to this day. One of the stupider kids in the group puts an egg in Brady’s girlfriend’s backpack, and the angry mother croc strikes. The houseboat, which they tied up for the night, gets detached from shore, and they wake up the next morning stranded, and have to find help, while the croc pursues them.

I’ve never heard a single positive thing about this movie, and I can understand why. Maybe I’m a little clouded by nostalgia, but I think Crocodile is actually a pretty entertaining movie, albeit not necessarily a good movie. The acting and dialogue are above-average, and I think that’s largely thanks to the director, Tobe Hooper, who is most famous for directing the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and, despite the controversy as to whether he directed it or Spielberg directed it, credited with directing Poltergeist. I think it’s cool that a director who’s worked on big Hollywood horror flicks would go back to a smaller budget production like this—his directing is what makes Crocodile elevated from just another throwaway killer animal movie to a fairly well-crafted, though still cheap, piece of entertainment. The only thing that I disliked about the first act of the movie, aside from the uninteresting teen drama, was the predictable false scares. Using one or two at most is acceptable, especially if they’re quick and innocent, but these get to the point of being annoying. Thankfully, there are subsequent jump/shock scares that are effective and unexpected, and enough legitimate tension is built up to keep you watching, even though you know hardly any of these characters are going to escape being eaten by the crocodile.

The croc is only shown in glimpses in the first half of the movie, but it becomes shown in full much more in the second half. Not that it really matters, but I don’t think a crocodile expert was consulted for this film. Last time I checked, crocodiles don’t lay their eggs in open nests (their nests are mounds of dirt with eggs inside), they don’t run across the land like monitor lizards for long distances, and they don’t grunt and squeal like pigs (which this one does a lot more than roar or hiss). However inaccurate the croc might be in real life, it’s more than adequate as the villain. It manages to rack up an impressive kill count, and a couple of the kills are pretty surprising and effective.

 

The special effects are very polarizing. The animatronics are good for the most part, with a full-length crocodile head, back, and tail used throughout that glides along the water’s surface, but it doesn’t move quite enough to look real—it’s still very clearly an animatronic, and the camera sometimes lingers on it a few seconds too long. On the other hand, the cgi, although used sparingly and limited to the later part of the film, looks cartoonish and unacceptable. It clashes horribly with the practical effects, and completely took me out of the movie. The only thing worse than the cgi is the ending. Normally the giant attacking animal is blown up or impaled or maimed so badly it dies, but not this time around. The movie simply ends, and I was shocked they didn’t blow up the croc. I won’t say what happens, exactly, but it couldn’t have been much more anti-climactic.

I can’t say Crocodile is among the greatest killer crocodile movies, but it’s definitely not among the worst, especially considering it was a direct-to-video release. The later part of the movie devolves into standard low-budget-creature-feature antics, whereas the first half works to deliver genuine horror and suspense, but it’s still enjoyable all the way through. Perhaps the biggest problem is Crocodile came out a year after the much more widely successful (and much better) movie I reviewed yesterday, Lake Placid, and many saw it as an imitator. While it does have numerous elements that are the same—the overall plot, an eccentric sheriff, people keeping crocs as pets—if you can look past these similarities and the shoddier aspects, Crocodile is a pretty good time on its own.