Twitter Plot Summary: A giant crocodile appears and bumps off some soldiers, who try desperately to stop it. And try to be heard over the bad audio mix.
Supercroc (aka Jurassic Croc here in the UK) opens with a laborious opening credit sequence with a small group of soldiers walking through a wood or a forest and just talking, talking and talking some more for good measure. This sets the tone for what follows, as despite the already short 85 minute running time it feels incredibly slow paced and lacking in tension when things start going horribly wrong. This is mostly due to sloppy editing and bad shot composition, but it’s further enhanced by bad acting and a yellowish filter on everything that leaves everyone looking like they have jaundice.
It’s obvious to anyone paying attention that this production was so cheap that they only used two or three locations – namely a forest, a small street and a small room acting as a military operations centre. Limiting the action to just a few locations can, in some instances, work well no matter the budget, but here it’s hampered by a script that is resolutely unadventurous. It boils down to a couple of appearances from the titular giant crocodile, a group of soldiers being gradually torn to shreds by the creature (usually off screen), and a group of admin and senior military staff back at base trying to figure out how to stop/kill the giant croc, and doing so in an incredibly boring manner.
This had potential to be a moderately enjoyable low budget creature feature, however the biggest mistake made is in the sound mix. Dialogue is often drowned out by sound effects and poorly structured music cues, meaning key elements of the story may be missed and further reduces any investment you may have had in the story. They don’t seem to have used proper microphones either – everything sounds like it was recorded using the camera’s on-board microphone which leaves everything sounding tinny and unpleasant. It’s made worse by the overly enthusiastic use of a variant of the Wilhelm Scream, which features twice in one particular scene in quick succession. Surely it would have been better to have had the actor actually perform a scream on location than to use stock library sounds? However you look at it, the poor sound takes you completely out of the story and leaves you struggling to hear what little plot there may be.
Unusually for The Asylum, this is not a mockbuster of some major cinematic release, but its influences are clear. Mixing up elements of The Lost World: Jurassic Park (the T-Rex on the loose in Detroit) and Lake Placid (giant gator/Croc causes epic destruction), and even 1998’s Godzilla but it manages to present itself as the poor, idiot cousin of those three concepts. A low budget isn’t necessarily an excuse for a bad film – if they had bothered to do anything interesting with the characters then it might have been salvaged.
I’ve seen my fair share of features from The Asylum, averaging from truly terrible to merely okay. In this case it’s almost entirely in the first category. The best bad movies seem to know that they’re bad and have a noticeable tongue in cheek tone. The worst bad movies are those that don’t even acknowledge that it’s cheap and plod along by treating everything with absolute seriousness. Supercroc is one of those films.
Score: 0.5/5
