Lake Placid 3

Old Sadie (Cloris Leachman) may be gone, but her reptilian legacies in Maine are left behind to frolic still in Lake Placid.

"Lake Placid 3" is the latest in the franchise where horny day camping teens, a seemingly happy married couple and child, bumbling local police and a cast of whip-fast CGI Crocs all come together in a perfect storm of wrong place, right time luck.

Eureka's Colin Ferguson plays Nathan Bickerman, a zoologist / Game warden fella who returns with wife and child to Lake Placid after his grandmother Sadie dies.

Nathan decides to save the local elk and keeps the house, moving his family to a place with no cell phone reception or visible signs of crocs, or civilization for that matter.

You know the drill; wife is a career women thwarted by the isolated new digs, teenage hikers abound with titillating almost nekkid skinny-dipping and swimsuit-changing scenes, a hysterical, sociopathic (unnecessary) Eastern European babysitter who smokes in the house, a kid bored out of his skull and dear old dad running around the woods with some prop from the Eureka set tracking elk, whose heads are washing up on shore without their bodies.

Circling back to Nathan’s son, the little devil is cleaning out the family freezer and feeding some crocs that he happens upon.

Pets! Boredom issue solved.

Fast forward two years; the kid is still a little whiny neglected baby and now he cannot placate the growling giant crocs with purloined food from his family freezer. The crocs act more like Velociraptors who sound like the outtakes from Jurassic Park.  What to do!

Shoplift meat, of course.

In between this problem child's enabling croc behaviors are several sets of college kids, backpacking, swimming and sexing it up on the shores of the bonnie Loch.

Should have gone to the Jersey Shore.

This is creature feature schlock at its finest and re-hashes the reptilian history from the previous films.  Ferguson is quirky, likable.  The wife Susan (Kirsty Mitchell) grates as the harried working mom. Then there is the character of Reba (Yancy Butler), the bat-shit town cougar who is a local animal killing mercenary for hire.

She's so over the top in her stabby, take no prisoners croc (and caged giraffes, don’t ask) killing zeal it makes the film bearable.  Think along the lines of Struthers (Sam McMurray) from Lake Place 2.

Snarky chain smoking Reba has taken out a hunting party to bring down an elk, and track a lost girlfriend of one of the party. Their venture into the lake goes badly, and the trip goes further south as they run from the crocs in the woods.

Michael Ironside plays the gun loving sheriff of the town and shines in his scenes with Nathan, and comes around to the notion maybe crocs are still an issue after a torso or two are discovered by the banks of the lake.

Now, understandably CGI is important to a film of this caliber.  The croc effects could have been better, and compared to Mothman, Mega Piranha and Mongolian Death Worm, they were inferior.  And that is saying a whole lot, right there.

The creatives responsible for this are writer David Reed and director G.E. Furst. Bulgaria is once again subbing for beautiful Maine.

Now, Maine has a lot of unemployed people and a local film crew with experience and real talent.  I cannot image why they couldn't just shoot in the USA; that bothers me.  Plus the catering would have featured local scrod,  lobster rolls and amazing steamers for the cast.  What a gyp!

What makes this a fun popcorn "check your brain at the door" Saturday night flick is Yancy Butler, who gets what a movie like this needs, over-the-top malarky.  Plus, the crocs come fast and furious and the body count is through the roof.

Not as good as "Lake Placid 2," but if you have no dough, and are homebound Saturday night and...ahem...get in the right frame of mind (not judging here) - go for it!