Lake Placid: Legacy (2018) – Review

If you can make a six-film franchise out of the comedy classic Tremors – a movie about burrowing monsters terrorizing a small town in Nevada – then why can’t a series about giant man-eating crocodiles terrorizing people in Maine work, too? One could, of course, argue the point that neither Tremors nor the original Lake Placid themselves warranted sequels, let alone five of them, but with cheap computer generated effects and low budget casting, there’s money to be made in them there hills…or lakes. With Lake Placid: Legacy, we get the typical entry that tries to pretend the previous sequels didn’t exist – a tactic familiar with fans of the Godzilla franchise – without any reference to the Bickerman family that made up the bulk of the previous sequels, as this sixth installment is to be considered a direct sequel to the 1999 original, in a chapter that would answer all those questions nobody was asking.

A group of Eco-terrorists, led by a gruff, bearded moron named Sam (Tim Rozon), are goaded into taking one final mission – my God, they were just two days from retirement – by Sam’s old partner Dane (Maxim Baldry). So the group heads to a mysterious location that somehow has been removed from Google Maps, and if our intrepid explorers reach this spot before Dane and his crew does – which is hard to believe possible as  Dane sent his video taunt from that location – then they will win $100,000 dollars. Now, I’ve seen movies with more implausible and ridiculous premises than what we have here – the latest Predator movie being a perfect example of this – but with Lake Placid: Legacy, not only is the reasoning for our cast of characters journeying into danger moronic, and so thin that it’s basically transparent, but there is almost no reason for doing so.

None of these asshats question why a $100 grand bounty would be offered for such a task.

The group is pushed into accepting this challenge by fellow member Spenser (Craig Stein), who wins them over with the unassailable argument of “The money, seriously.” Yet when they arrive at this mysterious lake, he’s the one who immediately starts bitching about everything that goes wrong, as if he was not the one who bullied them into taking the dare in the first place. That he is a black man in a horror movie should have been the first red flag that him taking this challenge was a bad idea. Joining the group are two local guides, who are along simply to add more food to the menu, and all they do is complain about how this job could be dangerous and also very illegal. Which it is, but what makes this hilariously stupid is that the chief guide, an ex-Marine named Pennie (Alisha Bailey), tries to reassure her partner that guiding a group of Eco-terrorists onto private property is not “on them,” as if only Sam and his crew would be found guilty of trespassing. I may not have gone to law school, but I don’t think she quite understands how trespassing works; “We only brought them here” is not a good defense.

“I survived fighting in Afghanistan, and will not be the first black person eaten in this film!”

Our group of Eco-Idiots then discover Dane’s campsite, which has been completely torn apart — with blood and entrails leading off into the forest — and when Dane’s GoPro is discovered revealing found footage of “the attack,” we get the asshat Spenser claiming that Dane is probably punking them, but the belief that it’s all a hoax quickly ends when they find the upper torso of one of Dane’s people hanging from a tree. Next, they come across a long abandoned facility – that was mentioned in Dane’s found footage – so they decide to go inside in hopes of finding a radio and medical supplies, and thus, the rest of the film is mostly these idiots wandering up and down dark and dank corridors waiting to be eaten.

The movie takes place in a mostly dark setting to hide how bad the CGI for the giant crocodile is, and its embarrassingly bad appearance is the only source of true humor in the film, which is a pretty big misstep when you consider that it was the use of humor that made the original film a success in the first place.

Sorry guys, but the red filter doesn’t hide how bad your croc looks.

In the position of “slumming actor” is Joe Pantoliano, who plays the villainous Henderson, the man that hired Dane to get him into this abandoned facility so that he could retrieve a DNA sample from the giant crocodile. Apparently, this facility was once the home of an evil conglomerate’s research lab – like there are any other kinds – and they were making giant crocodiles to “change medicine forever,” as a stem cell from one of these crocs could save countless lives, and this was all to be achieved by somehow combining DNA from an extinct dinosaur croc with a modern one. Yeah, that checks out. When the place was shut down, one of the crocodile handlers left with one of the specimens, to his home in Lake Placid, Maine. So that’d be the whole “legacy” part of the title, but it basically means nothing to the piece of crap we’re watching.

“Could someone please plug me back into The Matrix?”

Lake Placid: Legacy is a perfect example of a direct-to-video sequel that is just phoning it in, as there isn’t one ounce of originality to be found anywhere in its 90-minute run-time, all we get is just a group of morons running into the dark facility and then some of them running back out of the facility into the dark forest, then someone will run back into the facility, all while the CGI monster pops up like a teleporting Jason Voorhees to kill them. It is all so redundant and lame. There’s nothing on display here that even a bad movie-lover could sink his teeth into, as boredom is the operative word here, and even the perquisite gore is lame and goofy. Case in point, the croc seems to seize most its prey head first – even though we often see the victim’s hanging out of the maw with head and arms flailing – but then for some reason the killer croc leaves the bloody upper torso lying around uneaten, it even seems to have a trophy room where it stashes the remains.

Is this croc a serial killer or just a real picky eater?

I thought Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell was bad – and that film really is terrible – but Lake Placid: Legacy lowers the franchise sequel bar even further with this entry, as not only is the plot ludicrous and malformed, but the entire cast, especially poor Joe Pantoliano, all look to be having the worst time of their lives. This film is not in the “so bad it’s good” category, as there is simply no fun to be had while viewing it, and poking fun at this entry would be like shooting fish in a barrel, only not as entertaining. If you happen to come across this film while flipping channels one night, do not, repeat, do not stop and watch this thing; just keep on surfing.

This is one legacy you don’t want to inherit.