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Super Crock indeed

Watching SuperCroc I got the feeling that there was a pretty good idea for monster movie, but it was beaten down with poor sound engineering and a rush to get things done.

SuperCroc starts out with a 4 person squad of soldiers making their way through a camp site with two of the team planning their wedding. They have been sent in to check out a radar signature for "something". When they make it to the beach, they decide to stand with their backs to the water, making it real easy for a 60 foot crocodile to rise completely out of the water, eat someone, and get back in the water before anyone knows whats going on. Then the team leader gets eaten in plain view and our happy couple make a break for it. Things don't work out so well for the groom since the croc appears out of nowhere and eats him. Back in the command room, nobody knows whats going on. A scientist walks in and theorizes that the radar signature that looks like a giant crocodile is actually a big group of bees. That theory gets shot down when the video footage from the soldiers comes back showing a giant crocodile the size of the giant crocodile radar signature. They send in another 4 man team to take care of things, but 3 of them get eaten when they try to shoot the croc from very close range. Also the helicopter gets eaten out of the sky. Now its up to the bride to be and the other survivor to track the croc before it gets to L.A. (it does) and kill it.

The biggest problem SuperCroc had was its sound engineering. When half the dialogue is inaudible, it makes it incredibly hard to follow a movie. Bad acting and bad special effects I can deal with, but when you don't know what anyone is saying, it really ruins the movie. They also used the say gunfire sound looped over and over whenever anybody was shooting, but the sounds never matched the flashes painted on in post production of the guns firing. And for a couple scenes of an "angry mob", they used what sounded like a real riot while the scene had a bunch of campers standing around doing what they were told.

A little extra effort in the sound department could have brought SuperCroc into the "so bad its good" category instead of "so bad its painful to watch".

El Chupacabra

What a croc!

I knew I'd have to watch this one after seeing the preview. Who doesn't want to see a one-hundred foot crocodile from the depths of the earth's crust rain destruction on Los Angeles? Finally the California city can join the proud cities before it that have been transformed into smoldering craters by various super-sized monsters. For example, Godzilla and Tokyo, Godzilla and New York, and the lesser known human-sized seagull and Spokane, Washington. By the way, Godzilla, you're such an ass.

On the entertainment scale, I found this Asylum production to be at the lower end of what I have seen from them. I knew not to expect an effects laden, Jerry Bruckheimer exploding, monster extravanganza, but I just couldn't get into this one. Maybe it was the lack of scenes featuring the giant crocodile or the scenes that did feature it in which it stood there waving it's head from side to side like a cheap monster prop from a 1960's "it came from outer space" movie. Maybe it was the poor sound job done in the budget-minded "situation room". Maybe it was the fact that most of the movie seemed to be shot at a highway picnic area rather than LA. Or maybe it was the one line explaning why a crocodile the size of a bus was staking out some park land in California.

As near as I could tell, an ancient species of crocodile was trapped in the earths crust for millions of years until an earthquake managed to set it free. I'm assuming that the crack or cavern it was trapped in had a million years supply of food and cable TV. The movie does not really explain this and instead starts out by focusing on a group of soldiers wandering through a dusty forest. Two soldiers in the group are married to one another, a  possible sign that the US Army is forming their own Sacred Band of Thebes. What exactly the soldiers were doing there escaped me, but I was impressed at the authenticity of their equipment and uniforms. Unfortunately, their captain decides to stroll down by the lake and when his back is turned, he fails to notice a huge frigging crocodile sneaking up. No one else sees the massive reptile until it's too late for them. Meanwhile, in the situation room, a bunch of important generals and a scientist puzzle over what's going on. The scientist seems convinced that the satellite feed is picking up a cloud of bees at which point the generals discover she has a degree in English lit., not entymology.

As soldiers die, the generals decide against sending in tanks and instead send more soft, chewable soliders to their deaths. Some of the soldiers discover a nest of super crocodile eggs and call it in. A white flower-delivery truck shows up and some soliders pile out, grab a couple of eggs, and torch the rest. At this point, we discover that the crocodiles skin is impenetrable and the army want's to research its properties in order to make extremely durable handbags and cowboy boots. The monster crocodile is not happy about losing 56 of its 58 young and, on a hunch, heads to LA to get her two remaining eggs back. The army drops a very large bomb on the supercroc, but the creature as well as it's surroundings remain unharmed. Of course, in a B-movie, you can't actually expect to see a bomb drop and explode and this movie was no different. And let me tell you, hearing a couple generals talk about a large explosion from a huge bomb is no substitute for seeing one.

The climax was a highlight of the film as Asylum finales usually are. The crocodile head down a nondescript LA (was it really LA?) street and ends up in a warehouse district of some sort. One of the survining solders from the earlier encounters is advised to "go for the soft underbelly". Oh, cliché! The achilles heel of the villain, the missing scale in the dragon's armor. Rather than shoot an arrow through that missing scale, our modern soldier friend plants a large amount of explosives on the crocodiles belly causing it to explode much like a beached whale packed with dynamite.

Despite the interesting ending, the action in this movie was choppy and quite unexciting. At no point did I think that anyone felt they were actually being chased by a large, carnivourous dinosaur. The lack of desruction and carnage was disheartening as most of the movie took place in a forest where the destruction was contained to some trampled saplings. The only city damage was some stock footage of a building burning down. I understand budgets are tight, but a bit more mayhem would have helped break up the doldrums. It still had some great B-movie moments that invited merciless mocking and you might want to check it out if you're really into reptiles or highway picnic areas (Sacred Band of Thebes?).

Charles Bronson

DOES NOT MAKE ANY SENSE.