This made-for-TV creature feature has everything you will ever need in a movie - giant monster crocodiles, giant monster snakes, and lots of college girls in bikinis. It's also full of tired cliches, terrible dialog, amateur acting, unfunny comedy, and poorly-rendered CGI monsters, but if you want art, go read a foreign film.
It's a mashup of two monster reptile movie franchises, with a few characters from other Lake Placid giant crocodile movies and new people from the same blood-orchid-obsessed Wexel Hall pharmaceutical company that we saw in the other giant Anaconda movies. It's the fifth in the Lake Placid series, the fifth in the Anaconda franchise, and it's also approximately the fifty-five thousandth in the neverending series of nearly-naked-young-women-in-peril movies. But a few of this movie's women are more than just bloody cheesecake. Some of the most competent characters are the female sheriff and a couple of the college women, including one who makes a flame-thrower out of a can of tanning spray and a cigarette lighter, and an woman with tattoos and a nose ring who looks out of place with the cheerleaders because she's only studying them. She has the best lines in the movie. The flesh-eating reptiles are not the only terrifying monsters in the movie. The woman in charge of the pharmaceutical company and the woman in charge of the sorority outing are even more terrifying. (They're the ones who should be implanted with tracking devices and locked up behind an electric fence.) But this is a movie, and bad people are always more fun to watch in movies.
This is mostly a giant crocodile movie - the snakes don't have much to do for the first hour. In the beginning we see some guys in lab coats shooting some crocodile juice into an anaconda, because the pharmaceutical company researchers finally realized that the blood orchid fountain-of-youth serum would work on humans if they created a hybrid with one of their super anacondas. The only compatible reptile species they could find was the monster crocodiles of the Lake Placid series, so they hit the road for the Black Lake crocodile reserve with some of their genetically-engineered anacondas in a mobile lab. They break into the crocodile reserve, catch a giant croc, and shoot up a giant female Anaconda with croc juice so when she lays her eggs they will hatch the hybrid "Crocacondas" needed to make the serum. (You read that right. Crocacondas. That's got to be the next movie! Somebody made Piranhaconda, so why not Crocaconda? Unfortunately, years later, it still hasn't happened.) Then, much to nobody's surprise who has ever watched one of these monster creature flics, the maneaters all escape. And, because they have already eaten everything inside the fenced-off croc reserve, when somebody leaves the gate open, the crocodiles all crawl over to nearby Clear Lake to feast on unsuspecting college girls, poachers, wake-boarding frat boys, and Wexel Hall mercenaries who mostly stand around stupidly not shooting their guns. (We ee one of the mercenaries inside the belly of the snake with a flashlight after he's swallowed by an anaconda.)
As for the battle of the giant reptiles, there is no definite winner. The anacondas can wrap around and squeeze crocs until they explode in a fountain of blood, but a crocodile tosses an anaconda way up into the blades of a helicopter, creating a rain of blood. So, it's a toss up. We'll just have to wait until the Crocacondas we see hatching at the end of this movie grow up and star in their own sequel to see if they will dominate the others. And maybe we'll also get to see another mashup movie - Piranhaconda vs. Crocaconda. |