A lot of people watched last night’s Lake Placid 3, the Syfy channel’s latest new junk horror film, as a Saturday night time-waster and good excuse to make derisive jokes. It featured one of Syfy’s signature stars, Colin Ferguson from Eureka, as a zoologist who makes the mistake of bringing his family to a lake infested with chomping crocodiles.
LP3 followed the standard pattern for movies like this. Four minutes into the film, a swimming couple is dragged down into lake as the water around them turns crimson with their blood. Fifteen minutes in, gators come up onto solid land after a little boy foolishly feeds them meat. After 21 minutes, you got your grisly moose-head-decapitated-by-monster-animals shot. And before the first half-hour had gone by, a cute little doggy had been thoroughly chewed over.
It really didn’t matter who was playing the hero, for the purposes of the cheap scares and special effects of LP3, but Eureka‘s Ferguson did his job as well as possible under the circumstances. Yancy Butler, who started her career as a starlet with acting chops and has settled into the middle part of her work-life as a gravelly voiced woman-of-action, played a tough-talking hunter-guide who helped up the camp quotient with her snappy insults and general disdain for the wimpy young men whom she had to protect.
The original Lake Placid is perhaps best known for helping to launch the latterday image of Betty White as a salty old broad. White wasn’t in this sequel, but in a nice coincidence, she did win an Emmy award last night for her SNL hosting gig, as I predicted here.
Don’t forget that the Syfy junkorama we’ve been looking forward to all summer – Sharktopus, starring Eric Roberts — will premiere Sept. 25.
Did you watch Lake Placid 3? What did you think?
Follow: @kentucker
the first LP was craptacular. why whould they make another 2?
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I really liked the first LP. I thought it was really funny.
Wow was LP3 terrible. Not even good in the ‘its so bad it good’ way, it was just awful. I know it’s SyFy and they are working on a limited budget, but would it kill them to get people who can actually act? The college kids story was useless and the people they hired to play the parts should NEVER get near a tv show or movie again (other than the brunette girl who can go ahead and do some Cinemax movies). Just awful.
One criterion of what makes a B-movie is the horrible acting. It’s all part of it.
Don’t forget the predictable-All alone and no communication I believe thare are 5 musts in every B Movie
Bad acting is fine…this was worse than bad.
Hey, I loved it! I just loved watching those useless college kids get knocked off, one by one, especially the 2 guys who brought the dumb…er…unsuspecting college girls on a trip to the lake to make out, brilliant! Of course, you just knew that it had to be a kid whose parents neglected him who became friends with the crocs, sheesh, you would have thunk that they would have been grateful to the kid and his family for taking care of them in the first place. Very selfish of those crocs. Best of all, Yancy Butler’s performance was absolutely worth it to watch this movie, talking about chewing the scenery, Wow, what a ballsy chick she was!
I am still mad that syfy canceled FarScape and opted to do these awful movies.
I know get over it.
Don’t get over it! I miss Farscape too.
Agree! Farscape was one of the best tv series ever. And why SyFy can’t ever make just ONE decent movie is a mystery.
Just found Farscape on Netflix and am loving it.
SyFy used to have regularly intriguing programming, but now they’re just an assembly line churning out one craptastic piece of garbage after another. The original LAKE PLACID was kind of a cheesy camp classic with crisp dialogue and a great sarcastic tone to the entire film, thanks to David E Kelley. The others, just crap.
I turned it off after the first 15 minutes. Yecch. Colin couldn’t begin to save this one. I’ve heard Joe Flanigan (of Atlantis fame) is now filming a Skiffy “original” in Europe. Sad that two talented actors have to resort to this sort of garbage to keep their careers going. They are better than this, and shame on SciFi (I refuse to call them SYFY) for funding this drivel.
I agree, we watched Lost Treasure of the Grand Canyon-Michael Shanks and JR Borne were to awful for words haha. We watched LP3, those cheesy movies have to become a “spot the clhies(sp) and bad acting movies for us, after a long week at work we have a little fun
Only having seen the trailer, I can still say without a doubt, that nothing will ever touch Sharktopus. It walks on its tentacles out of the water and roars. I can’t wait.
I loved the first Lake Placid how could you not with Betty White and Oliver Platt?
This was really bad though, why didnt Syfy save the money and buy Firefly instead?
I guess they started making these on the theory that a cheesy sci-fi movie can be a lot of fun. That’s true, but these movies have gotten progressively worse over the years. SyFy used to market its Saturday night movies as “The most dangerous night on television.” My son remarked that that was true: it destroys billions of brain cells.
Didn’t see it. The first ten minutes of Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep put me off SyFy for the rest of the weekend. But could anything be worse than Ice Spiders?
Mega shark was pretty bad…..
I liked it!!!!I like Colin.
It’s a shame Yancy’s alcoholism has derailed her career I loved her on witchblade,and as the daughter of a Loving Spoonful, she was practically guaranteed fame. I hope she gets better parts, as IMHO, she is abeauty with great chops. Yancy, You go girl!!!
Wow Ken Tucker found a way to make another Betty White reference. Look, you can crow about White all day long but it won’t make you popular. The Betty White thing is over. And its really a shame for a “critic” to be a bandwagon jumper.
I love how SyFy spends all of $37.82 for the special defects in their original movies. That includes gratuities.
I love the first Lake Placid, but that’s because I’m a huge David E Kelley fan (I even loved From The Hip). As is the case anytime Kelley leaves a project (LA Law, Picket Fences, Chicago Hope) the writer or writing team can not keep up with Kelley’s style. I really would like to see Kelley return to this genre. His pacing and dialogue was top notch in the first film. I have never understood, even with a drastic cut in budget, why Syfy original films are not paced a little better than they are…that’s honestly where the key lies.
the first lake placid is a classic