Has your series completely run of ideas or it’s just not willing to get out of the genre comfort zones, but you still want to continue the franchise? Cross it over with a similar series, versus style.
Oddly enough, this is both the obvious (as it’s in the title) crossover between the Anaconda and Lake Placid franchises, but also the fifth movie in each respective series.
Elaborating on what i said at the end of the review for Lake Placid: The Final Chapter, the two series are quite the good fit for a cheap TV movie crossover, not only for the obvious reptilian killer animals involved, but as they both had a successful film first that was deemed good enough to be shown in theathers, and hence being more easily remembered by audiences.
Btw, the official DVD tagline for the film it’s quite fun and to the point “Crocks on the docks, snakes on the lakes”. Love these.
Shame they set the bar too high, but of course they do.
The plot it’s pretty much what you would expect, as in it involves scientist crossbreeding the blood of a giant female crocodile from Black Lake with a female giant anaconda, in order to perfect a Blood Orchid-based serum. The experiment doesn’t go as smoothly as expected, people are killed, part of the electric fence is destroyed, and some crocodiles escape from Black Lake.
On the nearby Clear Lake, sorority girls and fraternity boys are initiating new members, but the smell of bikinis attracts the animals, dumbass teens are teen, the local autorithies intervene (with Reba back as the sheriff this time around), anacondas are killed, crocs aexploded, etc.
And very late in the film the two species eventually face off against each other, again, it’s not a case of interspecies racism, the crocs and anacondas just happen to fight each other for food and territory, and mostly because they’re full of meat. Very neat.
On the plus side, we still have Robert Englund as crazy cousin poacher Jimmy Bickerman, that somehow survived the mauling by the crocodile, and he’s gone full “pirate mode”, with a hook end, an eyepatch and a peg leg, which is even better and makes it easier to overlook that he has less screen time in this one. Yancy Butler is also thankfully back as Reba, now sheriff.
On the downside, it’s mostly dumb, but not much fun, i found the sorority cult shit especially grating and annoying, like, i know you wanna make me hate these irritating characters to have them eaten by a croc later, but the result it’s still me having to trudge some unsufferable, cliched and irritating bullshit to get to the more entertaining crap.
Like the sorority leader punching a croc in the face and then immediatly getting eaten.
Even with the “pre-loaded” low expectations, Lake Placid VS Anaconda kinda disappoints, if that makes any sense to you. It’s definitely C grade “so bad it’s good” TV movie trash, cheesy enough to be fun and made entertaining thanks to the reptilian kill fest, thought there could have been more, in pretty much every way. But overall, it’s okay for this kind of killer animals cheesefests.
It’s worse than the previous Lake Placid: The Final Chapter, but still more fun to watch than Lake Placid 2 or 3, and the CG is slightly better than in those.
Or Boa VS Python, for that matter.
The ending shows a female anaconda eggs, from which a small baby anaconda with croc like features hatches, setting up another potential sequel going in full Asylum territory.
But that would have to wait, as the series would come back in 2018 (again, these sequels came out every 3 years or so), yes, but with a…. prequel?
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