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The Crater Lake Monster
[InterGlobal Home Video]
197?; color
Directed by William R. Stromberg
Starring: Richard Cardella, Glenn Roberts, Mark Siegel & Bob Hyman
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I'm not sure why I like this movie, but I do. Clearly filmed on less than a shoestring budget, The Crater Lake Monster is an interesting take on the time-honored monster-in-the-lake theme. A pair of paleontologists discover cave drawings depicting a meteor crashing into the lake near the cave, and of cavemen fighting a dinosaur. Everyone acknowledges cavemen and dinosaurs didn't co-exist and agrees that the drawings are a major scientific breakthrough, but their discovery is trumped by a meteor crashing into the lake. Yep, in this flick a meteor strikes the same place twice; only thousands of years apart. (I believe it has been scientifically proven that lightning can strike the same place twice, although the odds are greatly against it.) At any rate, this causes, among other things, the temperature of the lake to rise… enough to, say, act as an incubator for an ancient, dormant dinosaur egg. Once said egg hatches, we get a 50 foot plesiosaur chomping on cattle and humans alike. This is where the fun quotient in this movie starts to pick up, as the dinosaur looks like it's straight out of a Ray Harryhausen movie. (Keeping in mind this movie was shot in 1977 and special effects had advanced by light years since Harryhausen's glory days, it lends an odd throwbackness to the proceedings. Plus, I can't help it, there's something about the absolute non-threateningness of a claymation dinosaur that I find almost cute in a quaint, down-home-y way.) The local sheriff and the local paleontologist (every small town has one, right?) put their heads together to try and figure out a way to trap the creature while keeping it alive for the purposes of scientific research and tourism, but their plans quickly go awry when the dinosaur starts meandering further and further from his watery home, causing a rising death toll and an angry town on the verge of panic. To help round things out in this cast of elevated amateurs (none of the leads or the writer and director have any other film credits besides this one), we get a pair of hillbilly / redneck-esque yokels who run a boat rental place on the lake and sell "bait and tacle." (Yielding the memorable line: 'You spelled that wrong. Everyone knows bait's spelled B-A-T-E'.) Ostensibly in the film for comic relief, these two stumble upon just about every dead body in the movie and are, in many ways, the thread that ties everything together. Once we get to the final showdown we see what I feel is the film's most original moment: they kill the dinosaur with a bulldozer. (The sheriff just drives it right into the plesiosaur, grinds the blade up and down a few times into it's side, and the thing keels over dead.) While it's definitely unspectacular, as far as complete lack of suspense and being shot from a bad angle, it's still a unique method of death so I give the film credit for that. Overall, if you're a fan of mostly gore-free (and unfortunately suspense-free), cheesy horror from the '70s, this should be right up you're alley; and if you're a fan of cheesy creature movies specifically, this one's a must for all the wrong reasons.
—the Kommandant
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