Lake Placid 3 (2010)

The third film in the series that seemed planned to squander all of the goodwill gained from the first film, Lake Placid 3 isn't terrible, but it's still a very far step down from that first film.

Colin Ferguson and Kirsty Mitchell play Nathan and Susan, a couple who end up taking over the lakeside property left by Sadie Bickerman (there's no substitute this time around, no Betty White or Cloris Leachman amusing viewers as a profane elder). Unbeknownst to Nathan and Susan, their son, Connor (Jordan Grehs) soon starts to amuse himself by feeding baby crocodiles. But baby crocodiles soon grow into big crocodiles. Nathan soon has his hands full, much to his disbelief, helped by Sheriff Tony Willinger (Michael Ironside) and a local hunter named Reba (Yancy Butler). There's also a selection of teens spending time at the lake, bumping up the potential bodycount.

Writer David Reed, who also delivered the next movie in this series, at least does a better job than his immediate predecessors with mixing the humour and the thrills, and director Griff Furst is used to the format for this kind of thing (just browse his filmography to see a variety of great titles that tell you exactly what you can expect from him, including the likes of Arachnoquake and Ghost Shark). He's hampered by the low standard in special effects that most SyFy Channel seem to have, but that doesn't stop him from working well with a script that aims for fun over any attempts at plausibility. 

Ferguson and Mitchell are about as bland as you can get, but that's all well and good when you have Ironside being very likeable in his supporting role, as well as Butler being amusingly over the top as someone who enjoys hunting any kind of prey, from the local wildlife to local young men. Grehs just has to be a kid with a secret habit of feeding crocs, which he does well enough, and Kacey Clarke, Mark Evans, Nils Hognestad, Brian Landon, and Angelica Penn play the main teens/appetisers.

Slight spoiler warning here, I guess . . . for anyone who enjoys the turn from Butler in this movie, you may be pleased to see that she is able to return for the next two films in the series, both of which also feature Robert Englund, despite her last scene in this film seeming to have quite an unambiguous fate. Mind you, expecting rigid continuity in a movie series about large killer crocs is probably like expecting to find a side of chips available for a quid in a Michelin-starred restaurant.

If you endured Lake Placid 2 then you might want to at least check this out. It's not one I would recommend to anyone else though. Only the hardiest of creature feature viewers need bother with it (and, indeed, with any other sequel entry in this snap-happy series), and anyone who wants to enjoy an all-too-brief sequence that features crocodiles on the hunt in a grocery store.

4/10

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Arachnoquake (2012)

Arachnoquake - that's a great title, isn't it? Up there with the likes of Piranhaconda, Sharktopus and Frankenfish (which, don't laugh, is actually better than the title would make you think). Okay, I admit that a title like that probably wouldn't get everyone excited but most people know by now that a title like that will get me excited. My childish little mind starts to fill up with fluffy dreams of naive potential. I'm not completely stupid, despite how it may appear, and I know that these movies are more than likely to be horrible nonsense full of bad CGI but I also know that a lot of them make up for their failings with big helpings of humour, sometimes intentional but often not.

Arachnoquake starts off with a sense of humour accompanying the preposterous premise and bad CGI but quickly slumps to become just another horrible creature feature churned out for the Syfy Channel.

The biggest name in the cast would be Edward Furlong and it's a shame to see him in something this bad, especially after his appearance in the excellent Below Zero. Sci-fi fans might also enjoy seeing the likeable Ethan Phillips (best known to many as Neelix in Star Trek: Voyager) getting a decent amount of screentime. There's not much else here though.

Directed by Griff Furst, with a script by Paul A. Birkett based on a story by Eric Forsberg, Arachnoquake is a tale of giant, dangerous spiders released from an earthquake and the people who are thrown together and try to survive and escape the situation. Things start off ridiculous and fun but the movie just spirals down and down until it's nothing but ridiculous, sadly.

Aside from those already mentioned, Bug Hall plays a lead role and Tracey Gold is the person who just happens to know a thing or two about spiders. The rest of the cast is full of the hopeful and the hopeless, all playing characters that it's almost impossible to care for.

I suppose that I should grudgingly concede that things are okay on a technical level but I'm not even sure if that's true. The camera is usually pointing the right way and the audio is fine but when so many other aspects are poor or missing (such as the not-so-special effects, shot composition, the bland score from That's What I Call A Syfy Movie Vol. 4) it's hard to even admit that there's a minimum level of competence on display, though I suppose there is.

3/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Arachnoquake-DVD/dp/B008KYOFPE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1350074503&sr=8-1

Mask Maker AKA Maskerade (2010)

There's no need to tread softly here or sugarcoat the message, Mask Maker is a bad movie. I don't care about the feelings of those who made it because they didn't seem to care at all about the feelings of anyone forced to watch their rubbish.

The story is all about Jennifer (Nikki Deloach) being given a house by her boyfriend (Evan, played by Stephen Colletti). It's a present for her birthday, he managed to get the property and 40 acres of ground and everything inside the house for $10,000, and the aim is to put enough work in to renovate the property and then sell it for a tidy sum. Because that makes the most sense. As opposed to other ways to use the $10,000. It's not as if Jennifer and Evan are a bit of a shaky couple who may not stay together further down the line. Oh, hold on, yes they are. That's made clear during one of their conversations in the first 15 minutes of the movie. Yes, things start at that level of unbelievability and get worse from there. A bunch of dull characters join the lead couple, a couple of familiar faces show up for cameo roles (mainly Treat Williams in a very small role and the great Michael Berryman) and someone goes out of their way to mention quite early on that there is no phone reception in the area.

Director Griff Furst, who also wrote the screenplay with Eric Miller (and Miller was helped in an earlier stage of the writing by Jake Kennedy - did this rubbish really need three writers?), doesn't seem to be trying for most of the runtime. Things are only ever livened up by the lowest common denominators - gore and gratuitous nudity - and even then the film struggles to hold your attention.

The cast try but are hampered by the material that they're working with. It's just too ridiculous and at times bordering on parody. Nikki Deloach is a decent leading actress until the final act, when things are stretched way beyond breaking point, and Anabella Casanova and Mariah Bonner are both pleasingly attractive and not allergic to some fleeting moments of being nekkid. Stephen Colletti, Ross Britz and A. J. Allegra are disposable males, overshadowed by the likes of Terry Kiser and the more famous names already mentioned above (Berryman, in particular).

If it had at least tried to do something with conviction then Mask Maker could have been a lot more fun. Instead, it fails to recreate the slasher thrills of the video nasty era (unlike Hatchet which, while I didn't love it, gets things just right) and it doesn't have the intelligence or humour to invest the stale material with something that could transform it into more than a poor pastiche of 101 better movies. Jonathan Breck is wasted as the main villain and the moment near the end of the movie that lifts a trick directly from Friday The 13th Part 2 should be enough to make you laughingly dismiss the whole thing, if you still had any hope left that there would be some redemption.

3/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mask-Maker-DVD-Nikki-Deloach/dp/B0076VJ2ZK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1342624388&sr=8-1