Crocodile (2000) by Tobe Hooper

Director: Tobe Hooper
Year: 2000
Country: USA/Mexico
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Creature Feature

Plot:
While out in the swamps, a group of vacationing college students on spring break accidentally steal a mother crocodile's eggs from her nest, and upon discovering this, she unleashes a torrent of vengeance upon them, forcing them to team up with a pair of hunters to survive the slaughter.

Review:

This one here was a pretty enjoyable and reasonably entertaining killer creature feature. Among its greatest assets is that this one is fairly cheesy, making a lot of fun out of what is essentially a slasher movie with the villain being an unstoppable crocodile instead of a human. That there’s a lot of time here getting to see the kids having fun at the lake, partying and goofing around at the lake that has some pretty good parts before getting to the creature action shortly afterward. The plot is still pretty predictable, but along the way, we are treated to some pretty cool jumps, from the croc lunging out of the water in a massive spray of water or the jump from the campfire, which is pretty cool.

The fact that the attacks that arise here with the CGI creature as the main attraction and using the admittedly excellent animatronic in spurts where it looks ultra-convincing throughout these moments gets enormously cheesy as well. The three main attacks, the riverboat attacked when it's docked away in the tree ruins after chasing them through the water and eventually destroying the boat, the foot-chase through the woods where it gets to attack on dry land and the supermarket attack are the films' big action moments so there's a lot to like as well as it's brutal and bloody deaths. By featuring limbs ripped off, decapitations, death rolls, and even live devouring, it's got more than expected in here and gives this one a lot to like.

There are some big problems here. The biggest flaw here is that no matter how good a mixture of both uses for the creature are given, the scenes with the CGI crocodile are completely unnecessary and utterly distracting. While that's a fairly nice addition to try mixing both features here, the fact that the film is using both as responsible for generating its attacks highlights how awful the jarring CGI is when it looks slimy and completely incapable of involving itself in its environment which looks laughable as they don’t mesh at all with the rest of the live-action creature also featured on-screen.

The other big issue with this one is that there are a lot of scenes that are just oddly put together. The whole small subplot about the two farmers who knew about the crocodile and are explaining to the sheriff what a crocodile can do to a person was simply unnecessary. It didn't have anything to do with the movie, only to add body parts to the film. As well, the continuous cutbacks to the group trudging through the darkened woods doing nothing but complaining drag on way too long to the point of not actually being enjoyable as we start to lose sympathy for them with the way they complain, bicker, belittle and yell at each other as long as it is. These here are the film’s main issues.

Overview: ***.5/5
If you have to watch a killer creature flick and already watched the main two in the genre, this is a solid next one to try out. It is a tad bit cheesy, but then it belongs in that genre of the teens-trapped-in-a-forest-with-a-killer movie. It has a lot of good parts as well as a few bad parts, and it is very entertaining.