If you liked Jaws and Jurassic
Park, rent Lake Placid. We watched it last Saturday and
it was a
fun-as-hell, rock-and-roll ride of a movie about
a freakishly large crocodile who somehow makes his
way from Asia to a lake in Maine and starts biting
the heads off Sheriff’s Deputies.
Bridget Fonda was charming as the nebbishy paleontologist
sent from the New York Museum of
Natural History to examine the tooth pulled out
of the truncated half of a fish and wildlife diver.
She’s got a thing about mosquitoes and a thing
about snakes and a thing about sleeping in tents,
but for the first time in her life she finds
herself in the middle of something and she can’t get enough of it.
Bill Pullman is appealing as always as the Fish
and Wildlife expert in charge of the expedition who is
Fonda’s would-be suitor.
Oliver Platt is a stand-out as the hilarious kooky
rich mythology professor who treks the world to swim
with crocodiles because he thinks they’re “godly.”
He has the best lines of the movie, as in the scene
where Fonda is trying to convince the Federal
Fish and Game Authorities to dispatch officers to the scene
after they’re convinced that the thing in the
lake that keeps attacking people is in fact a crocodile.
After several minutes of unsuccessful attempts
to persuade the man on the phone, who won’t send help
because nobody has actually seen the crocodile,
Fonda loses patience.
“Thank you,” she says, “It’s so rewarding to imagine my tax dollar finding its way to you, you fuck-shit.”
“You are a saucy flirt,” Platt says with admiring bedroom eyes.
And they followed the recent tradition of putting
1950s and ‘60s starlets in the role of the wise-cracking old lady.
In this case, it was Betty White, who plays an
eccentric and wildly irreverent woman who lives on the lake and
tries to keep the crocodile a secret from the
local authorities. She’s got lines like, “If I had a dick, this is where
I’d tell you to suck it.”
I won’t give anything away, but the plot loosely follows the lines of Jaws, only with a much happier ending.
Don’t expect any deep, overarching metaphors about
the meaning of life, but if you want to laugh like hell
and have a great time, rent Lake Placid.