LAKE PLACID
When I was 16 years old I went to Castle Towers in Castle Hill and attended what is now an Event Cinemas featuring a Vmax screen but at the time was a humble Greater Union. On that day I bought tickets to see the film Lake Placid. Walking into the cinema I noticed that my preferred seats were already taken (back row, off to the side, away from other patrons), so I sat toward the front. Up the back of that cinema were a group of rowdy teenagers and, as a non-rowdy teenager, I was on high alert.
The lights went down, the trailers started, and that’s when I was hit with a jaffa. On my shoulder. I did nothing. A short time later another jaffa landed nearby. This was it. This was the cinema experience I had long dreaded. I had head of this sort of stuff but it was spoke of in hushed tones like that of legend. Could there really be folks out there so disinterested in the art of cinema and so devoid of a gluttonous need to consume every piece of candy that they would be willing to throw away treats whilst a movie was taking place? My fears were realized. These monsters were real.
And yet. Try as they might, they could not spoil Lake Placid for me. I have said so many times before that I absolutely love a movie about a big ass crocodile taking big ass bites out of regular sized people, and Lake Placid is no different. Even while under attack from a species of creature more hideous than that on screen I was still able to appreciate this particular big ass croc.
Lake Placid is written by David E. Kelly for some reason. 1999 was a big year for him. Ally McBeal, The Practice and this crocodile movie. This same year he also wrote Mystery, Alaska, a movie about a hockey team in Alaska starring Russell Crowe that absolutely nobody talks about that I also saw in cinemas that same year because I was that kid. The kid who was always going to the movies and was absolutely deserving of a candy-coated chocolate to the back of the head.
The giant crocodile in question is terrorizing the small town of Black Lake in Maine and a ragtag group of exceptional actors have to do something about it. Bridget Fonda stars alongside Bill Pullman, Brendan Gleeson, Betty White and Oliver Platt (who, while a great actor, is probably miscast as a horny croc hunter). Fonda is so great, and much like Sarah Polley who we talked about in Dawn of the Dead, she has also hung up those acting boots for whatever reasons that suggest that they’re personally so much better off, because the film industry is probably even more awful than we imagine, but as moviegoers we are worse off because they are great and it would be great to see them be great in more stuff.
Where would I fit into Lake Placid? I’d love to have been responsible for one of my favourite line readings in film – Pullman asks Gleeson if there were any recent bear attacks, Gleeson says “Bears don’t attack people under water.” Pullman fires back “Probably a beaver then.” And I don’t know why, but I cannot get enough of it. Here’s a link to the moment in the trailer.
It’s absolutely not worth the opening of a new tab to hear it, but I would love to have been a part of that scene, and really I think I would make an exceptional sheriff’s deputy.
IF I WERE IN 'LAKE PLACID' I WOULD: BE EATEN NEXT
