For our entry on what now is the “Nessie subcategory” of Dino Dicember, we’re going away from the Irish lochs and into the b-movie version of Northern California, with The Crater Lake Monster.
Directed and written by Richard D. Stromberg, this is an infamous one, indeed, often hailed as one of worst giant monster films ever made, or at least one of the cheapest ever put into production, and unsurprisingly it has received the Rifftrax treatment.
The plot is an obvious, deliberate throwback to monster films of the 50s, and was originally meant to be about the Bigfoot, but due to a glut of films on the cryptid, Stromberg figured it would be better to go even further back and make it about dinosaurs, why not,
Archeologists find a cave in Crater Lake that has wall drawings depicting humans fighting something that looks like a Plesiosaurus, incredibile evidence that dinosaurs did actually exist in the same time as humans. Pity that a meteorite lands in the lake, causing a cave-in that completely destroy the discovered caves system and its wall drawings.
On the bright (?) side, the meteorite seems to revive or awake a long dormant creature within the lake, a giant plesiosaur akin to the more famous Nessie.
As is a throwback to drive-in B-movie of the fiddies, the sheriff investigates as people are misteriously attacked by an unknown creature… unknown to the characters, i mean, its the giant plesiosaur, do not let the cover art giving him arms (the plesiosaurs were acquatic, hence they had fins) to make the dinosaur look like a T-rex for marketing value.
While the plot it’s very ’50s, the flannel and mustache combos are very ’70s, and the effects are embarassing right out of the gate, as the meteorite is OBVIOUSLY just someone launching a large flaming firecracker or something in a somewhat straight arc, but i will be honest, i expected worse for the dinosaur effects….maybe that says more about me than the movie, but i did brace myself for worse. It’s a single, immovable, head prop of the plesiosaurus, but what the fuck, it isn’t made of papermaciè, so whatever, and sometimes it’s done claymation style, which is actually decent all things considered.
I’m used to FAR, FAR worse, even for cheap monster films.
Mind you, it’s all so obviosly shot on a micro budget for something like this, with spatters of bloods on boats and places where we must imagine (as the movie doesn’t have the budget to show the attacks in any detail) the plesiosaur killed someone, letting aside the fact this thing was able to sneak up on anyone in the first place, even with the very b-movie fog surrounding the lake.
Even if the production was messy due to the production company Crown International basically doing shit without asking the director or writer beforehand, the end result is an incredibly cheap, badly directed film, edited by a fuckin dinosaur too i suppose, with absurd timecuts that feel like we accidentally hit skip on the remote and missed entire scenes, for better or worse.
Plus there’s no tension, characters are dull, acting subpar, subplots often end as suddendly as they appeared, the script is all over the place, the music is canned arse, the dialogues seem recorded on a string telephoneand, there’s the intent of adding some light comedy to the proceedings via a couple of bumbling, boring rednecks that own a boat rental service. Problem is, there’s no tension for comedy to give relief from, and these two aren’t exactly Laurel and Hardy, pity as the script really makes the viewers spent a lot of time with them, more than with what should be the main characters, fitting as the narrative just kinda boredly bumbles about, until the sheriff has decided enough people died, so… it’s time for him to confront the slasher-o-saurus with just a gun.
Might as well, he doesn’t do shit for most of the film and nobody listens to him anyway.
Wait, he does decide to not call for help and just tackle the monster by himself via a bulldozer, which was basically a loan from Dinosaurus!, that already says it all in terms of “how cheap” the whole ordeal was.
All closed off by a very brief showdown and un unfittingly somber-depressing ending. YAY!
So cheap that there was no post-production, so scenes obviously shot in daytime are passed off as nightime, not that can excuse the overall incompetence in pretty much all aspects, which oddly makes for some actual “so bad it’s good” value, i must admit, and it’s barely above 80 minutes, so it’s a quick sit.
There is some fun to be had by laughing at it (and i swear i’m not sponsored, it just happens a lot of crappy movies i review also have been riffed by either MST3K or Rifftrax, this being no exception), since the films it’s unintentional funny, as when it tries it’s not, but oddly it’s kinda stuck in the paradoxical situation of being too good to be “properly” bad enough and hence enter fully the “so bad it’s good territory”, yet bad enough to be not actually be proper “good”.
Still, it’s far from the worse giant monster film or dinosaur flick, though in a way it’s lucky being reviewed here and now instead than for Giant Monster March, as it would make very difficult for other films to match this “quality” (and it would drag down the metacritic, if i cared about that), it’s one of those whose charm is from how obvious it can be, for example it’s so transparent that they forgot to add a human villain in the mix until mid-way through production, so this random thief/robber is introduced so he can become dinosaur chow some scenes later.
It’s not like there’s a proper structure that this movie follows, and instead just kinda messily, drunkly stumbles about doing random shit that doesn’t really connect together and is just kinda there.
The most notable thing is that the very brief stopmotion dinosaur effects were done by Phil Tippett, whom was also working as a special fx artist for Star Wars at the time, and nowadays is a master in the craft, bringing us masterpieces like Mad God.
Can’t say Stroemberg got it as good, as the only thing he worked on after is an anthology horror film, Night Train Of Terror (1985), as a visual artist, and before he mostly worked on an older, short film adaptation of William Brabdury’s A Sound Of Thunder, which he also directed.
The supervisor to Tippett’s stopmotion work here, Dave Allen, later went to work with Charles Band’s Full Moon Films/Features and stuck around till the 90s there, if this a better or worse fate than Stroemberg’s the jury is still out on that.
And will remain so undefinitely, i’d say.
Wise Cafe (International) 