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Alligators and Crocodiles in Movies   Lake Placid (1999)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   This is not so much a horror movie as a cheezy monster movie that makes fun of itself and the genre. There's also a love story thread along with the jokes and crocodile carnage. The first sign that things are a bit odd is that the movie is called Lake Placid, but the lake in Maine is called Black Lake. They said it's because the name Lake Placid was already taken, which makes even less sense. All that matters really is that there's a 30 foot long monster crocodile in the lake. Somehow, the 150-year-old Asian crocodile swam around the world, ended up in Black Lake, and started eating vacationers. A motley group of people show up to try to deal with the croc, including Bridget Fonda's Kelly Scott, an uptight paleontologist from New York, a handsome Fish and Game guy, local law enforcement officers, and a crazy mythology professor who travels around the world to swim with crocodiles. He thinks that crocodiles are a divine conduit, because they have been worshipped as gods all over the world. There's no need to describe the plot. The movie follows the usual monster movie format. So these are a few of the crazier events in the movie: we see a man decapitated after playing recordings into the lake of baby crocodiles to attract the croc; the croc lunges out of the lake to grab a grizzly bear and drag it into the lake; the croc pulls a helicopter out of the sky; and a crazy old woman who lives on the lake (Betty White) feeds the crocodile cows, so the croc hunters suspend a cow from a helicopter, as if it is a giant tea bag, to use it as bait to make the croc come out of the lake. At the end we see Betty White feeding baby crocodiles at the end to set up a sequel. In fact, as of early 2020 there are six movies in the Lake Placid franchise, including one other movie on this list - Lake Placid vs. Anaconda (2015). The crocodile looks pretty good for a movie monster. It's a 30 foot long animatronic animal, enhanced with some computer visual effects, that was build by the prop maker who created the monsters in Aliens and Jurassic Park. We barely see it on screen, too, which helps to keep us thinking it's real. There is also a brief snake scene in the movie. When everybody is walking around the lake looking for the crocodile, they find examples of crocodile carnage, including a severed head. When someone pokes the head with a stick, a snake crawls out of the head's open mouth, like some kind of biker tattoo, and everybody is disgusted.