Lake Placid vs. Anaconda

The Anaconda franchise is my favorite guilty pleasure film series out there, so when I watched this I expected some silly CGI fights with the Anaconda and the Crocodile, but I didn't really get it. The anacondas are in this film for a total of about 7 minutes, and the short fight we get between them is disappointing in every sense of the word. What really made this film boring though was the characters. They were either really stupid, really bland or mean and annoying. The characters in the Anaconda franchise are pretty much always terrible but at least they're terrible in a fun way, these characters had me bored to death. I don't recommend this film at all even if you enjoy the other films in the Lake Placid and/or Anaconda series.

Watching this movie made me really speechless. It is not the bad script and cheesy lines that made this movie bad. It was the terrible acting from all the actors. You will have to watch this movie for yourself and be the judge to everyone's acting in this movie. It is amateur hour on screen, very stiff acting, terrible expressions and poor chemistry. When I saw the ratings on IMDb, I thought to myself 4/10 ain't that bad. So I told to myself why not give this movie a try, I knew what I was getting myself into, but never expect it to be this bad. Anyone out there who can give this rating above 5, you are definitely not watching enough movies or actually sober to give this movie a rating, or you are a dude just giving a high rating for the boob flashes in the movie.

Granted, I knew well enough when I sat down to watch the 2015 movie "Lake Placid vs Anaconda" from the title alone that this was most likely going to be a stinker. And it was. Oh, how it was.

But hey, I do enjoy the occasional creature feature, and some of the "Lake Placid" and "Anaconda" movies have actually been watchable, and with iconic Robert Englund in the movie, of course I had to watch it. Now, I am wondering why he agreed to appear in a movie such as this.

The storyline in "Lake Placid vs. Anaconda" is as generic as they come, even for a creature feature. Man is manipulating with Mother Nature and messing with the genes of animals, when something goes awry and the creatures escape to wreak havoc on the local area.

Now, the storyline could have worked, as it was generic enough to actually be essentially the same as every other "Lake Placid" or "Anaconda" movie, but it was so dumbed down by a lack of proper acting and atrocious CGI that it was such a horrible experience to sit through this movie and bear witness to such god awful CGI were even made in 2015.

I can't honestly recommend that you waste your time, money or effort on this movie from writer Berkeley Anderson and director A.B. Stone.

My rating of "Lake Placid vs. Anaconda" is a mere three out of ten stars. Stay well clear of this one, people.

I'm amazed that either of these franchises actually survived this long, and even managed to create unholy union which is far worse than any of the original titles. It knows it's bad, it revels in the awfulness. There's myriad of silly antics, you'd expect stupid bimbos and fake soldiers, you will have them in spade.

Cue the freak of nature and human arrogance to harness profit even though it's downright lethal, then like Jurassic Park had done decades ago, let it loose. What follows is typical random passerby getting mauled. It plays the stereotype in incredibly shameless dose. The girls are highly plastic to ensure there are sorority babes, practically naked victims prance about obliviously for your viewing pleasure.

The acting and visual are unsurprisingly bad. It's as though they use blunder footage and video game graphic from two generations ago. It's so bad, one can't help but laughing. Everyone knows, from the actors and audience, the movie is awful. Honestly, we're watching a movie titled Lake Placid vs. Anaconda here.

Sadly, embracing the crappy nature doesn't make it much better. If you have low expectation of this movie, it will definitely succeed in delivering such expectation. I feel I must apologize for even mentioning Jurassic Park in this review.

The first Lake Placid movie was very enjoyable, if with its flaws. The second was awful, with a waste of its big names. The third was an improvement, but still mediocre at best. The fourth, strangely called The Final Chapter, had some big flaws but was much better than expected and the best since the original. This latest entry, Lake Placid vs. Anaconda for me was the worst since the second movie.

Lake Placid vs. Anaconda is saved from total doom by the good performances of Yancy Butler, Robert Englund and Corin Nemec. Butler is very authoritative and 'kicks ass' (a term I very rarely use) in her very feisty role, and Englund has indeed some funny moments and is suitably ruthless and nutty as well. Nemec is appropriately hard-nosed and is entertainingly sarcastic. The Bulgarian scenery is reasonably attractive too.

What does stop the scenery from making more of an impression is that Lake Placid vs. Anaconda does have a rather drab look, the photography is not expansive enough and is a mixture of static to rushed and dizzying. The special effects, as expected, are rather dire, looking cartoony, artificial-looking (like large bits of rubber) , inconsistently sized and incomplete, especially the anaconda. The creatures, both anaconda and crocodile on top of looking cheap, are not threatening at all and somewhat under-utilised with nowhere near enough of the anaconda.(there's also not enough of them together either). The music is not very well placed and is overbearing and not eerie enough, sometimes inappropriately jaunty.

Here, the dialogue is full of stilted gibberish, and a lot of the humour is too cheesy and sometimes appears at the wrong time, cheapened even further by some horrendous dubbing that is far too obvious. The story is a confused mess of ideas and doesn't seem to know whether it's trying to be comedy or horror. The comedy, apart from some amusing moments, is very badly written, reeks of cheese and appears in inappropriate places sometimes, and this is coming from somebody who knew not to take things seriously. The horror moments completely lack tension or suspense, is not used enough and often too brief, further disadvantaged by sloppy editing and the cheap-looking creature. The characters are basically every cliché and stereotype in the book, and with a lack of charm, empathy and apart from Butler's and Englund's are annoying and bland in personality.

Much of the acting, apart from Butler, Englund and Nemec, ranges from stiff, melodramatic to non-existent. Oliver Walker's comic relief annoyed rather than amused at the end of the day. The whole movie felt very under-directed as well. Overall, pretty poor and the worst of the Lake Placid series since the second movie, though not as bad. 3/10 Bethany Cox