LAKE PLACID: THE FINAL CHAPTER

Following the latest deadly attacks on the inhabitants of Lake Placid, the government has placed the crocodiles that infest the area in a zone delimited by an electric fence, given the impossibility of eliminating them since they are extremely rare and therefore protected. During a school trip, the bus carrying Chloe accidentally enters the protected area infested with crocodiles, and a real nightmare begins for the students. The girl manages to contact her mother, the sheriff of the county, who immediately assembles a rescue team that includes the former hunter Reba - who has already clashed with the crocodiles of Lake Placid - and the engineer Loflin, who designed the fence. Meanwhile, a group of poachers led by Jim Bickerman has also sneaked into the crocodile perimeter. The saga of the killer crocodiles of Maine has incredibly reached its fourth chapter, and for three chapters it has been an exclusive of home video, with all the consequences that this can entail. The first film, directed by Steve Miner in 1999, was not bad at all, a sympathetic aquatic B-movie full of irony and with a well-chosen cast, the 2007 sequel was of such low quality as to be frightening, and the third chapter, dated 2010, was a low-level piece that at least had the merit of entertaining with its exploitative ideas. With "Lake Placid 4 - Final Chapter" a step back is taken, the excesses and irony of the third film are neglected, and a paradoxically serious story is told that resembles that of "Lake Placid 2" both in tone and in the developments of the story. Here too, a sheriff who must save his offspring in danger and the same goes for a hunter (a hunteress, in this case) who is contacted as an expert to manage the crocodile problem. But surprise, the hunteress is Reba, the same one who was thought to be dead at the end of the previous chapter, played again by Yancy Butler, and indeed the prologue of "Lake Placid 4" directly connects to the end of the previous film, showing us how Reba survived the massacre in the Birckman farm. A merit of this saga, in fact, is the common thread that connects all the films from the first to the last, represented not only by the setting but also by the Birckman family and what they have caused with the breeding of crocodiles. In this fourth chapter, for example, we find a cousin interested in the inheritance of the Birckman sisters, who inevitably finds himself confronting the other inheritance, that represented by the giant reptiles that infest the area. A trait d'union that I personally find adds a minimum of value to films that otherwise have really little or nothing interesting. Because while on the one hand there are still today productions of a certain value that bring to the scene killer crocodiles (some relatively recent examples are "Primal Fear," "Rogue," "Black Water"), on the other hand the market is saturated with low-budget productions made on an assembly line that, if they turn out to be bad - as in the case of this "Lake Placid 4" - means that we have been lucky! The demenstial productions of Asylum, for example, have totally sunk into the mud any semblance of credibility related to films with giant crocodiles, as well as with other killer animals. A real meat grinder for this genre! "Lake Placid 4" is, therefore, the classic home video product in which one cannot certainly expect quality. It is entertainment, yes, with a rather high pace and a multitude of killings that also spill into splatter, a high body count that is then the soul of the film. So-so actors who play fairly banal characters, seen and overseen in this type of film, such as the young and beautiful sheriff (Elizabeth Rohm) who flirts with the handsome man from out of town (Paul Nicholls), the virginal and capable girl (Poppy Lee Friar) surrounded by clueless peers who will have to serve as cannon fodder, and the usual hunters/poachers who have not a shred of characterization. Among these, we can also find Robert Englund, as charismatic as ever, but unfortunately now trapped in small roles in these low-budget horror productions... a great actor who certainly deserved a better fate. The digital effects with which the killer beasts are made are of rather low level, although clearly better than those seen in the two previous chapters and in the vast majority of direct-to-video films on the same theme. The subtitle says "Final Chapter," but do not believe it, the epilogue screams a fifth film.