Lake Placid
(Directed by Steve Miner; starring Bill Pullman, Bridget Fonda; 1999)
“What an animal does in the water is his own business—unless he does it to man.” So says Sheriff Keough, one of the crocbusters of Lake Placid. I couldn’t disagree with him more. The thirty-foot crocodile in this movie stays in the water, contentedly munching on bears and cows, until scuba-diving beaver-taggers invade his domain. It’s their own fault that the beast gets mad and eats a scientist and half a game warden.
The croc inhabits Black Lake, in Maine. (There is no Lake Placid in the movie, which may be its most intriguing mystery). It is, we learn, an Asian crocodile. “How did he swim across the sea?” a lawman asks, not unreasonably. “They conceal information like that in books,” one of the movie’s croc lovers answers sarcastically. I dunno; I thought it was a pretty good question.
As the movie opens, two game wardens are tagging beavers, to study their movements. Suddenly they’re attacked by an underwater camera, which lunges at them in an unconvincing imitation of an offscreen threat. It becomes clear that Black Lake harbors more than beavers, although for my money the scenes involving beavers were the scariest in the movie. Can you imagine being underwater, inside a beaver dam, with angry animals the size of footstools whose teeth can chomp through logs?
When it becomes clear that Black Lake harbors a gigantic beast, an oddly assorted crew assembles to search for it. There’s fish warden Jack Wells (Bill Pullman), museum paleontologist Kelly Scott (Bridget Fonda), Sheriff Keogh (Brendan Gleeson), and millionaire croc-lover Hector Cyr (Oliver Platt), a mythology professor who believes “crocodiles are divine conduits.” Oh, and there’s Mrs. Bickerman (Betty White), who lives in a cute little farm cottage on the shores of the lake and lost her husband a few years ago. That’s her story, anyway.
Whether the movie was intended at any point to be a serious monster thriller, I cannot say. In its present form it’s an uneasy compromise between a gorefest and a comedy—sort of a failed Anaconda. One peculiar aspect is the sight of an expensive cast in such a cheap production. We’re looking at millions of dollars’ worth of actors in the kind of aluminum boat you see on display outside Sam’s Club. Given the size of the crocodile, this movie lends a new meaning to the classic Jaws line, “We’re going to need a bigger boat.”
There’s tension between the locals and the visitors, between the croc lovers and the croc killers, between the sheriff and the state game officials, between the sexes, and between everybody else and Betty White, who uses language that would turn the Golden Girls green. Almost all of the disagreements involve incredibly stupid decisions (would you go scuba diving in a lake with a hungry giant crocodile?). New meaning is given to the disclaimer “no animals were harmed during the filming of this movie” by a scene where a cow is dangled from a helicopter as bait for the crocodile. I believe the cow wasn’t harmed, but I’ll bet she was really upset.
Occasional shots are so absurd they’re just plain funny. Consider the way thousands of perch jump into the air because they’re scared of the crocodile. What’s their plan? Escape from the lake? I liked the way the croc’s second victim kept talking after he’d lost half his body. And the way the Fonda character was concerned about toilet and tent facilities in their camp; doesn’t she know she’s an hour’s drive from Freeport, Maine, where L. L. Bean can sell her a folding condo?
The movie is pretty bad, all right. But it has a certain charm. It’s so completely wrongheaded from beginning to end that it develops a doomed fascination. We can watch it switching tones within a single scene—sometimes between lines of dialogue. It’s gruesome, and then camp, and then satirical, and then sociological, and then it pauses for a little witty intellectual repartee. Occasionally the crocodile leaps out of the water and snatches victims from the shore, looking uncannily like a very big green product from the factory where they make Barney dolls. This is the kind of movie that actors discuss in long, sad talks with their agents.
Larger than Life
(Directed by Howard Franklin; starring Bill Murray, Linda Fiorentino, Janeane Garofalo; 1996)
Curious, how in such a disappointing comedy, Bill Murray manages to dash off a hilarious warm-up. The opening scenes of Larger than Life, showing him as a third-rate motivational speaker, are right on target, with one zinger after another aimed at after-dinner speakers who promise to remake your life with touchy-feely slogans.
Murray plays Jack Corcoran, whose trademark slogan is “Get Over It!” He shows a banquet crowd how to unleash its hidden abilities by calling for volunteers to make a human pyramid. His clients include the American Motion Upholstery Assn. (reclining chairs), but his agents promise him some bigger fees, real soon. Meanwhile, he’s preparing to get married, urged on by his mom (Anita Gillette), who has always told him his father drowned while saving helpless children.
Not true. A telegram arrives informing him of his father’s death. “You mean I had a father all these years?” he wails, and his mother explains she left her husband because he was “irresponsible.” Maybe he was. The old man was a circus clown. Jack’s inheritance includes a pile of bills and a trained elephant named Vera.
Most of Larger than Life involves Jack’s attempts to move Vera entirely across the United States, to California, where the elephant will end up either as the victim of a sadistic animal trainer (Linda Fiorentino) or as part of a breeding herd being shipped to Sri Lanka by an environmental activist (Janeane Garofalo).
The formula for road movies, even those involving elephants, includes colorful characters encountered along the way, and two of the bright spots in a dim screenplay are provided by an old carny named Vernon (Pat Hingle) and his tattooed wife Luluna (Lois Smith). They knew and loved Jack’s father, and teach Jack some commands which (sometimes) make Vera perform an amazing repertory of tricks. They also advise him to avoid the straight life and become a carny, not a rube.
Jack’s adventures with transporting Vera include a train journey, followed by an attempt to maneuver a semitrailer truck. And we meet Tip Tucker (Matthew McConaughey), a manic semi owner-operator with weird theories about everything in American society, especially school lunch programs. He pursues Jack and Vera cross-country after they misuse his truck. At the end of the journey, Jack has to decide between the circus and the zoo for Vera—and, in a way, for himself.
The materials are here to make a good comedy, I guess. The screenplay is by Roy Blount, Jr., a funny writer. But the energy isn’t there. Murray often chooses to play a laid-back, detached character, but this time he’s so detached he’s almost absent. He chooses to work in a low key, and the other actors, in matching his energy level, make a movie that drones instead of hums. Comedy is often about people who are passionately frustrated in goals they’re convinced are crucial. Here Jack hardly seems to care, as he and Vera mosey along cross-country, bemused rather than bedazzled by their adventures.
The sad thing is, there are the fixings for another comedy, probably a much better one, right there in the opening scenes. Motivational speakers are ripe for satire. The bookshelves groan with self-improvement volumes, all promising to explain the problems of your universe, and their solution, in a few well-chosen rules. An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its “self-help” section: “For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history, and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.”