a review of 惊世巨鳄

HOOPTOBER XII NIGHT SEVENTEEN: Hitting the halfway point on this year's challenge with the one and only firm requirement, a film from the founder of the feast, Mr. Tobe Hooper. After doing this challenge for the past 8 years (and having gone back over the last few years to experience the first four years that I missed) one could reasonably say that I've now basically exhausted all of the "good" movies in Hooper's filmography. There's definitely a reason why TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and POLTERGEIST and SALEM'S LOT and LIFEFORCE are all still celebrated today as iconic genre cinema and his later works like NIGHT TERRORS and CROCODILE (True fact: His lowest-rated on Letterboxd) are not, and I won't try to debate that fact. At first blush, this is a direct-to-video knockoff of the previous year's LAKE PLACID, aimed squarely at the post-SCREAM audience with actors who wouldn't have looked out of place in a WB teen soap of the era. The movie is perhaps rooted more in the AMERICAN PIE school of raunchy teen comedy, but when the opening titles came up in a faux hand-scrawled font it reminded me just a bit of the logo from Kevin Williamson's *other* big '90s smash, DAWSON'S CREEK. And the movie basically stays rooted in that '90s teen-schlock tone for the entire first half, before suddenly taking a turn into more conventionally Hooperesque territory: Protagonists stuck in the middle of nowhere, suspenseful killer-POV shots, and unsettling hillbillies with ambiguous intent. From this point on, the film settles into a more parodic mode, with Hooper poking fun at all the old TEXAS CHAINSAW tropes (albeit without the kooky transgressiveness of TCM PART 2) through the lens of "what would a bunch of preppy a-holes from an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog do in one of my movies?" which makes it seem like Tobe was at least having fun with the assignment even if he wasn't particularly inspired by it. The real let-down here are the extremely bad visual effects, especially the KNB mechanical creature effects, which are usually the best part of movies like this; Whenever the practical croc replica appears in a scene, it's either a totally static prop floating like a dead log in the water, or an obvious puppet creature with very limited motion. Even worse are the early digital FX (not by KNB) that alternate between looking like a blurry Playstation 2 cut scene and the even blurrier in-game graphics from a PS2 game, while also being totally off-model from KNB's practical work. FInal note: I did enjoy "Princess", the tiny dog that appears throughout the film purely as a red-herring victim; Dog lovers can be reassured that she survives the whole film ALL THE WAY TO THE END, including an absolutely ridiculous shot of the dog randomly leaping through the croc's jaws in an absurd display of total narrative invulnerability.