Croczilla (2012) Review

Croczilla (2012) Review

 

At first glance Croczilla might look like it’s been picked off the trash pile of cheaply-made killer animal exploitation films from the 2010’s, but this one is a little different than most, mainly because it’s a Chinese monster movie (apparently China’s first monster movie) and it goes against some of the conventions that are recycled endlessly in this subgenre. The real question is: would I call Croczilla one of the gems atop that trash pile? Well, not exactly.

Unlike most killer crocodile movies, this creature isn’t a mindless killing machine or a wild animal that humans have accidentally ran into or an oversized monster resulting from experimentation, it is almost a character. This 36-foot crocodile is named Amao, and you better get used to hearing that name, because the characters yell it over and over as if the crocodile might respond. Crocodiles are smarter in real life than they’re usually given credit for in movies, but this movie gives them a little too much credit, and at times depicts them as almost being trainable. You can condition a crocodile, but not train one. Amao lives in a croc sanctuary, but the owner has to give them away, so he sells them to a gangster who wants to cook them up as an exotic meal for his restaurant guests. Amao escapes and comes across a woman in a field who has a bag full of 500,000 euros. Amao eats the bag but not the woman and continues to rampage across the countryside, so the woman goes to the local police and tries to get help in retrieving her money, while some other folks try to recapture Amao.

What I will give Croczilla credit for is at least trying to come up with a unique and interesting story to insert the generic premise of a crocodile on the loose. I have to put emphasis on trying, though. In concept, the idea of a croc eating a bag of money (the original title was Million Dollar Crocodile) and an assortment of characters either trying to get the money back or capture the croc or just stop it before it hurts more people is decent, but the execution is questionable. At many points it feels like a Chinese version of a generic Hollywood monster movie, but it’s the purposeful insertion of some humour and bizarre moments that give it some unique flavour. The characters range from kind of annoying to quite annoying—there’s a young boy who is friends with Amao and somehow never gets attacked by her, his cop dad who is mean and a bit boring, the bumbling gangster and his lackeys, the woman who lost her euros, and the only one who really matters: the crocodile, Amao.

Amao is mainly depicted using CGI, and for the most part it’s actually pretty good. Some shots feature a real crocodile, but there were a couple times where I found it hard to tell if it was real or CGI, which is pretty impressive considering the production did not have a big Hollywood budget to work with. Some of the CGI does look pretty bad, but all the best moments are when Amao is on screen, and they don’t try to hide her or tease her until the end. She isn’t really the villain here; despite the title, Amao could actually be more easily compared to King Kong than to Godzilla. She kills a few people and eats them but there isn’t too much explicit gore. Croczilla is one of the very few PG-13 killer croc movies, and it doesn’t really go for the usual non-stop action and violence, it’s more about the quirky characters and situations, which will be refreshing for some viewers and disappointing for others.

Even with this being a monster film from China, it still features many of the clichés frequently seen in North American films of this kind. There are some lame jump scares, there’s a moment when a character is surprised he didn’t die only for him to be eaten a second later and it’s supposed to be surprising for the audience but isn’t, and it goes for the obvious sequel bait setup which you know won’t have any payoff (because a sequel doesn’t exist and probably never will). But, like I said before, some of the quirkier aspects are what save it from being a blowout. The young boy and his dad are constantly playing Duck Hunt on NES, even though the movie is set in contemporary China, and the dad makes the kid stay home and count corn all day instead of letting him go play with his friends. The series of events that leads to the woman losing her money to Amao are pretty amusing, and there is a particular musical queue that is used over and over whenever she does anything in the first half of the film. It becomes funnier every time they re-use it, and it gets played to the point of absurdity. Early on I suspected they would find a way to get the money back by the end, but as the movie went along and Amao became more of a sympathetic animal than a monster, I started to question how they could do it without her dying. The filmmakers went for a surprisingly brutal conclusion that once again evokes memories of King Kong.

Croczilla is an above-average killer croc movie if we set the bar midway up on the trash pile of disposable animal amok flicks, but if we set the bar where the true gems sit, like Rogue, Alligator, and Lake Placid, then it’s a bit below the bar. It is a precise ninety minutes and there are definitely some fun moments throughout, but I’d really only recommend it if you’re a big killer animal movie fan like I am. It’s pretty tame and doesn’t take itself too seriously, but is too competently made to be classed as so-bad-it’s-good, which is ultimately a bit disappointing.