Has a career as a future victm. And nice facial hair, dude.
There’s not much subtlety in The Crater Lake Monster (1977). Even the title is fairly much a ballpeen hammer between the eyes. This is the chronicle of the struggle of a mountain lake community to survive the sudden appearance of a plesiosaur in their lake. Hatched from an egg warmed by a piping hot meteor that lands in their lake, first it slurps up all the fish, and then begins to sate its appetite for fresh meat on those juicy little two-legged nuggets wandering about on top of the lake, as well as on its shores. It’s sort of a buffet.
Along with the relentlessly sober lawman and his sidekick doctor, we also get a comedy team in the form of a pair of young guys who make money by renting boats to tourists. They can’t fix a motor, they are more than happy to get drunk for the camera, and their discovery of the disarticulated head of one of the victims during a wrestling match over control of their informal company – which goes on for way too long – think of sawdust in a loaf of bread – only brings them to sobriety against their will.
There does seem to be some dim concept of story-writing present in this debacle. A drunkard who has killed two people at a liquor store and is taking potshots at our intrepid lawman ends up as a tasty tidbit for the monster. But it’s clumsily done and a bit of a graft, really, as if someone suggested that bad people should come to bad ends halfway through filming. But I must admit they cast the right guy for the murderous drunkard part. And, again, at a moment of tragedy the moviemakers do linger on the face of the victim’s only mourner, who actually doesn’t do too badly in his attempt to fathom how his buddy falls victim to a monster out of time. Add in some attempts to make it seem as if these characters have an existence outside of this story, and you get the feeling there was an attempt made to make a quality movie.
But in many other ways this is just a casual fuckup of a movie. The monster, done in stop-motion, is clearly made of clay, bright green paint, and not enough film frames. It is nowhere near the standards set by the legendary Ray Harryhausen. And it doesn’t seem to have read the predator’s manual about sneaking up on prey. Roar roar roar.
But I truly loved the bit where a couple is cruising the lake on a powerboat in midafternoon, and yet the lady stares up at the sky and proclaims the stars have never been so beautiful. Er, what now lady?
What to use when it’s time to spank the monster.
In any case, the townspeople get together to decide if they’ll kill the menace or just try to capture it for science (yep, there’s some nominal scientists running around) and tourism, when a toothsome tidbit manages to escape the monster and crash their meeting. In the resulting fray, we lose half our comedy team and we discover modeling clay is no match for a small tractor.
Wow, this was awful. I only watched because I was too tired to turn it off.
And now I have an excuse to add an artist’s conception of a plesiosaur in action from here:
Grim looking bugger. There’s even a website about plesiosaurs, although I didn’t peruse it.
