The Crater Lake Monster (1977) – Review

The idea of a Loch Ness type monster inhabiting a lake in Northern California is certainly an interesting premise but an interesting premise will only get you so far and as often is the case it will at least require a modicum of a decent budget to correctly pull off but with The Crater Lake Monster Crown International Pictures had no money and no idea what they were doing, possibly due to a complete lack of understanding of the basic fundamentals of filmmaking, and thus the resulting end product was as bad as it was cheap looking.

Note: The poster boasts “A beast more frightening than your most terrifying nightmares!” yet not only is this movie not frightening in the least but the creature on the poster does not even remotely resemble the plesiosaurus that appears in the movie.

The movie starts with paleontologist Dan Turner (Richard Garrison) and his girlfriend Susan Patterson (Kacey Cobb) showing off a startling discovery to their friend Richard ‘Doc’ Calkins (Bob Hyman) that of cave paintings depicting people fighting off a Plesiosaurus, despite the fact that millions of years are supposed to separate mankind from these giant reptiles. Unfortunately for them, a flaming meteorite crashes into the nearby lake resulting in a cave-in that destroys the cave system and the drawings and basically rains on everyone’s parade. The next day Sheriff Steve Hanson (Richard Cardella) agrees to take the three scientists out on the lake to search for the meteorite only to discover that the heat from this space rock has resulted in the entire lake becoming approximately ninety degrees warmer than normal which, apparently, is the right temperature to awaken a Plesiosaurus from a centuries-old slumber.

It rouses itself and decides to visit the Ponderosa for dinner.

The increased water temperature not only caused a long-dormant Plesiosaurus egg to hatch but also to reach full monstrous maturity in record time, to which it then quickly proceeded to munch on some tourists, now, one would assume the primary protagonists of the film would be the sheriff and the two paleontologists but you’d be wrong as the film spends the bulk of its running time with two local idiots, Arnie Chabot (Glen Roberts) and Mitch Kowalski (Mark Siegel), whose attempts at starting a boat rental business leads to several people having disastrous encounters with the monster and to say these two are the film’s “comic relief” is being way too generous as every moment spent with them would make an hour at the dentist seem like a pleasant reprieve by comparison.

These two yahoos are an affront to comedy and deserve to be eaten.

Nothing remotely resembling a plot unfolds during the film’s tedious 83-minute running time and it’s all made worse by a bizarre subplot concerning a liquor store holdup man, who kills the clerk and a poor hapless patron, before later getting in a high-speed car chase with the Sheriff that results in the crook/murderer driving his car off a cliff but then after a bit of a foot chase, during which the Sheriff shoots the asshole in the leg, the killer is then eaten by the monster. That is one overly complicated set-up for just some random kill by the title creature, it’s one thing to have a character come to a kind of karmic end but this whole bit with the liquor store robbery has the appearance of something that had drifted in from a completely different movie, and we still have a half-hour to go before the end credits roll.

Who thought a crazed gunman was needed in this particular monster movie?

Stray Observations:

• Dr. Calkins tells Sheriff Hanon that to a paleontologist finding a meteorite is better than “Finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow” but paleontology is “the study of ancient life” so they wouldn’t be all that thrilled about finding a space rock, well, unless it woke up a dinosaur that is.
• The first victim of the Plesiosaurus is killed when the creature comes ashore to eat some poor sap which is odd as this particular marine animal was definitely not amphibious by nature so anybody twenty feet inland should have been safe.
• The Sheriff describes the creature as looking like an alligator but with flippers instead of feat, seriously, that’s the impression he got seeing that thing? Wouldn’t your first reaction to seeing that monster be something more along the lines of “It was a fucking dinosaur!” and not that it was an alligator as big as a house?
• Dan Turner repeatedly refers to the plesiosaur as being a dinosaur but they are actually from completely separate orders of animals, which being as a paleontologist Turner should have known, and thus it puts credentials into question.
• Not since the epic steam shovel versus Tyrannosaurus Rex in Dinosaurus have we seen such an epic battle than with this one of Plesiosaurus versus bulldozer.

“Hey dude, back off, I was just looking for the lake.”

This could have been a fun Jaws rip-off, with a paleontologist trying to convince the local authorities that somehow a prehistoric creature had taken up residents in their lake, but instead, we get the “Hillbilly Comedy Hour” whose antics gets more painful by each passing minute, then there’s the fact that film provides no real decent monster attacks to break up the tedium and add to all that the issue of being saddled with a cast of actors who wouldn’t pass muster at your local community theatre, which just adds insult to injury. As to the creature itself, the life-size prop used to depict the creature in the water more closely resembles that of a giant rubber novelty turd floating in the lake than it does a Plesiosaurus head, and while the stop-motion animated model was fairly decent all I could think of was that it deserved to be in a much better movie than this one.

Smokey and the Plesiosaur.

Unfortunately, bad acting and a hackneyed script were not the only things plaguing this production as Crown International completely screwed up the financing and thus no money could be spent on post-production, thus some poor hack was given the job to edit the film while many of the scenes that were shot day-for-night were not tinted and thus people were saying stuff like “Moonlight on a gorgeous lake, so beautiful and peaceful under the stars” while it was clearly daytime. Basically, every moment of this film is an exhibition of cinematic embarrassment.  There are many fun low-budget monster films out there but this is not one of them as pacing is beyond sluggish and the characters range from dull to outright annoying. The Crater Lake Monster is a perfect example of how not to do a monster movie and that even if you don’t have the money to fully realize your vision at least get a script together that makes at least a lick of sense.

Science Note: Crater Lake was formed by the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Mazama, less than 8,000 years ago, so it would be impossible for 65-million-year old plesiosaur eggs, fossilized or otherwise, to be present on the lake floor.