What it’s about: Kelly Scott (Fonda) is a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History who gets dumped by her boss (Arkin) and sent to Maine. A Fish & Wildlife guy got attacked by something in a remote lake up there, and they found an almost-prehistoric looking tooth in him. So city-slicker Kelly sets out with stoic F&W investigator Jack Wells (Pullman) and the cranky local sheriff Hank Keough (Gleeson) to find the killer beast. They are joined, somewhat against their will, by Hector Cyr (Platt), a wealthy and eccentric professor of mythology, convinced (correctly) that the beast is a crocodile, an animal that should not be in Maine, and is determined to preserve it as an ecological miracle. But despite the reptile’s impressive size, even finding it will be a challenge, let alone trying to capture it. Especially if it has help.

Reflections: This is not about lawyers and/or Boston, so David E. Kelley is out of his wheelhouse here, and he’s not good at it. Instead of characterization, we get a lot of quippy sarcasm and childish bickering that I think is supposed to be funny, but is actually much more annoying. The actors involved are all much better than this and none of them seem to be relishing it other than Betty White (a frequent collaborator and apparent muse of Kelley’s). There are fat jokes, although calling them jokes is generous, casual misogyny, the invoking of a lot of obviously basic stereotypes. And the story barely does anything–moments of action or tension are sparse, leaving plenty of room for the characters to argue about dumb shit.

I inherited this from a house I used to live in, where it was one of the movies that would get put on coming home from a night at the bar. And it’s perfect for that. On the one hand, it’s so stupid, it’s kind of breathtaking sometimes. As just one example, there is what should be a kind of “oh shit” reveal during the climax, but the movie does absolutely nothing with it and returns to the status quo immediately–it’s bonkers. There are lines of dialogue that are completely baffling. What little scientific premise there is is hand-waved away. The romance is bizarrely flat. It’s all madness. And then on the other hand, I’ve seen this movie sorted as comedy horror, but I would not call it that. It’s barely a comedy, and more like a slightly gorier cousin to something like Dante’s Peak or Twister, where a force of nature is out of control and must be respected and feared. But there is a pretty good shlocky horror movie in here somewhere. A giant crocodile tries to bring a helicopter out of the air. A dude’s head gets bitten off so fast, no one sees it. If the movie had decided to be more that instead of leaning into the banter stuff, it would’ve been pretty good and there is enough of a streak of it that it’s fun to imagine.

This is a bad movie. I don’t even know if I’d call it a good bad movie–honestly, it’s kind of grating, especially during the first act. But I do have a certain sentimental fondness for it and I find it fascinating in the way it wants to be so many things and doesn’t manage to pull off any of them. Why does this exist–what made David E. Kelley, arguably at the peak of his success with Ally McBeal and The Practice, write this? How did such a talented cast end up in this cheapo, 82-minute B-movie (at best)? Why is it called Lake Placid when the name of the lake is Black Lake? It boggles the mind, and there is a certain pleasure to that.