Lake Placid Review

Review of Lake Placid (1999) by screenqueeen: 👍 4/5

the thirteenth night in the lonesome hooptober day 33 film 27 cats: 0

82/100

i think Steve Miner may be my favorite of the 'little directors that could' in horror. he stole my heart in the FRIDAY THE 13TH series with two back-to-back sequels i revisit the most and solidified his stature in the annals of horror with the first HOUSE film (imo his most solidly 'good' movie). i think he started officially having fun with WARLOCK directing Julian Sands (rest in peace king) and Richard E. Grant as butting heads in the same picture but couldn't quite seem to push it over the hill in camp mode.

going over Miner's filmography it seems like he did his best to make as many people happy as possible but that can come at a severe cost (see: SOUL MAN, MY FATHER THE HERO, and everything else after LAKE PLACID). with WARLOCK, FRIDAY THE 13TH PART III(D) and LAKE PLACID he learns how to have fun in his own playgrounds that for all intents and purposes seem to spit in the eye of the ideas executives peddle during the creative process of filmmaking.

right after helming a legacy sequel with the slasher character FRIDAY ripped off of (after after the fact, with Miner's own first feature-length effort), Miner clicked the hardest with former attorney David E. Kelley's self-aware monster croc creature feature horror comedy script. bouncing back (in my opinion) from kinda stumbling in the shadows of Kevin Williamson's constantly shrugging H20 script (there's some good stuff in there too) trying to color in his lines, Miner hits a really good fucking stride in this one.

LAKE PLACID takes its place in the pantheon of 'endlessly quotable' genre cinema for me (right up with HEATHERS, PSYCHOS IN LOVE, JENNIFER'S BODY, SHOWGIRLS, GALAXY QUEST, and ROBOCOP to name only a few). this hit at the perfect time when the sci-fi (now syfy*) original movies started to populate with those "giant monster versions of various natural predators now start rampaging against people" plots and premises. i missed it because i was a fraidy cat in the face of horror movies until shortly after i hit my first puberty, which i chose to self-baptize in the waters of Crystal Lake, meeting Sean Cunningham and Steve Miner; Joseph Zito; Danny Steinman; Tom McLoughlin; John Carl Buechler; Rob Hedden; Adam Marcus; and Ronny Yu (i didn't get to X until a while later, it felt too "sci-fi original movie" to me, in a pretty funny comedically cyclical closed loop that only fate can script).

Steve Miner connected to me the most first off and the latent humor i saw in parts II and III(D) only flourishes here in PLACID. everyone here is someone both in their characters and as actors building off of each other. there is never any wasted energy. the horror doesn't really pull its punches either, the opening kill is extremely surprising and a visceral redo of that one scene from ALLIGATOR* (i'm sure there was a conscious connection there) where a guy gets pulled up into a boat with his legs coming apart from his body. now this is what i'm fucking talking about. more than anything this feels like Miner's big celebratory lap of everything going right, including making a commercially successful horror film that has more than favorable critical reception. add to that the clear satisfaction everyone displays in this and that's a recipe for real movie magic.

*my favorite is Kelly's line in the morgue: "i don't mind dead men -- bodies."

**i'm still so fucking mad over that rebrand

*you can have your own fun triple feature of this, the next hooptober film in my list (CROCODILE) that i call in my head the "interior CROCODILE / ALLIGATOR" double within the LAKE PLACID / CROCODILE / ALLIGATOR triple bill