Lake Placid: The Final Chapter (2012)

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1. 

   CinemaDump

   With The Final Chapter in its title, you still have to wonder if this will truly be the final entry of the Lake Placid series. Following a sort of successful theatrical release in 1999, I guess some suits somewhere saw promising numbers when Lake Placid hit the small screen. Turning into a TV movie series, Lake Placid: The Final Chapter is the fourth Lake Placid film and I hope it truly is the final chapter.
   
   Yancy Butler is back, but everyone else is new. The biggest star of LP:TFC is definitely Robert Englund of A Nightmare on Elm Street fame. Every other actor is who you'd expect to be in a cheap TV production such as this. For example, Elisabeth Röhm I'm familiar with because of some dumb Christmas TV movie I saw called A Christmas Kiss. Surprisingly, actress Scarlett Byrne actually had a small role in the later Harry Potter movies as Pansy Parkinson. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like she was able to trampoline into something more worthwhile though.
   
   Synopsis
   
   Reba (Yancy Butler) has been made to work with EPA because of her past crimes as a poacher and also because she's now the expert at killing the crocodiles found in the lake. An electrical fence has been placed around the lake in question and killing the crocodiles is outlawed now since they are the only ones of their kind. Conservation and all that, don't you know? Things get out of hand when a bus full of high schoolers somehow find their way into the enclosure as well as a team of poachers who plan on getting rich from rare Lake Placid crocodile loot.
   
   Review
   
   So once again, Lake Placid: The Final Chapter is nothing than an excuse to have poor CGI crocs attack and kill a whole bunch of people. The crocodiles this time around are even more silly in the sense that they can gallop like horses and they roar just like a lion would. I suppose you could make the argument that Lake Placid crocodiles behave this way because they're not regular crocs, so logic can just be thrown out the window I suppose. There's lots of fake blood and gore as well as the necessary nudity that you'd expect from such a high quality piece of entertainment such as this.
   
   Yancy Butler plays her annoying, sarcastic and condescending character a little less annoyingly this time around which is good. There are many examples of awful dialogue and acting all over the place but it makes for some funny moments. Stereotypes are all over the place when it comes to the high schoolers too. Characters make unbelievably stupid decisions and they don't see what they should see right away. How can the pervert bus driver miss seeing the two topless high school students in the lake before getting to the water to relieve himself, thus catching their attention? I don't know. Why does Max Loflin (Benedict Smith) open the gate to the electrical fence when he hears someone screaming to call back to them? Call from outside the fence idiot! But that's how these movies are right? There wouldn't be a movie if these people didn't make dumb decisions or not realize what's going on right in front of them.
   
   The thing about Lake Placid: The Final Chapter is that with turning up the ridiculous factor of crocs running amok, it's a slight improvement over the previous two Lake Placid movies. It's more of a "fun" bad movie and Robert Englund helps out a lot with that. Yeah it's filmed like a turd and the jump scares are pitiful but this entry had me laughing way more than the other two movies.
   
   It's surprising to me that I ended up liking Lake Placid: The Final Chapter more than it's predecessors but that's what happened. That's not to say that it's a great bad movie or anything, but it found the beginning of that road that leads towards good bad movie territory. I didn't like the first Lake Placid even but Lake Placid: The Final Chapter was a pleasant surprise to me after two horrible schlock fests.
   
   Rating
   
   3/10 9 years 7 months ago

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