No Good Very Bad Movies 20: The one that's worse than Planet of Dinosaurs

 

Title: The Crater Lake Monster

What Year?: 1977

Classification: Knockoff

Rating: Guinnocent!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

In the course of my time writing movie reviews, my longest-running rant has been the futility of “worst movies” lists, to the point that I started this feature pretty much as a rebuttal. All my usual points especially apply if the standard is objective quality and competence. The reality is that you can always point at the likes of Robot Monster, Plan 9 From Outer Space or Troll 2 and laugh at them for being absolutely inept. But then if you’re enough of a masochist to do the real legwork, you’re quickly going to find that there are really dozens and hundreds of movies at least as bad; what’s more, you will find that the vast majority are simply boring. This is why I really don’t do much with actual “B-movies”, especially before the mid-’70s or so. With the present movie, I’m making an exception to the rule. It happens to be an example of my first love among low-budget genre films, the stop-motion dinosaur movie, and as advertised, it makes Planet of Dinosaurs look good.

Our story begins with a small group of characters exploring an ancient cave in the woods of the northwest. There, they discover petroglyphs that portray a “dinosaur”, specifically a plesiosaur that nobody points out isn’t actually a dinosaur. Soon after, disturbances ensue as several mountain men and tourists are lunched by a creature that mostly stays off camera. A lawman and other voices of authority realize something is amiss, while two local knuckleheads who rent out watercraft simply worry that their clients keep disappearing without returning their boats. Things heat up when a liquor store robber runs into the wilderness, where they come face to face with an enormous archosaur that has somehow kept a low profile until now. As the body count rises, it’s up to the sheriff to turn the tide- with a commandeered bulldozer!

The Crater Lake Monster was a 1977 film directed by William Stromberg from a script cowritten with the eventual star Richard Cardella. The film was funded and distributed by Crown International (see… Galaxina?), with a reported budget of $100,000. Stop-motion effects were provided by David Allen. Cardella later criticized Crown for significant issues with the released film, including the lack of post-production work on scenes filmed as “day for night”. The movie was released in late 1977, for a reported box office of $3 million. Donald Glut’s The Dinosaur Scrapbook noted it along with Planet Of Dinosaurs as independently produced “fan” stop-motion dinosaur films, without further comment on the quality of either film. Andrew Smith later described it as “nearly as bad as its reputation”. Of the cast and crew, costar Michael F. Hoover went on to an effects career in films including the 1988 version of The Blob and Spider Man 2, while Stromberg’s sole additional credit was for effects in the 1985 film Night Train To Terror.

For my experiences, I got into old monster movies in large part because of stop-motion animators like Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen. To this day, I continue to be amazed by just how far even the least of their efforts exceeded the actually typical monster movies of the 1950s and 1960s. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long to figure out that the golden age was passing by the 1970s, especially later in the decade. That brought me to Planet of Dinosaurs, first encountered in a VHS box set, which remains a mindboggling low for actual incompetence. In the process, I also first heard of the present film. It was only much later that I got to this film, and it immediately stood out as probably about as inept, yet somehow vastly less entertaining. It’s like the difference between a bad Italian movie and a bad French film; the former might not be any better, but you wouldn’t expect it to be boring.

Moving into the film itself, I have two things to admit. First, I watched my copy of this movie literally a decade after buying it, albeit as part of a larger set. Second, I spent almost the entire viewing working on another review. In my defense, this is absolutely a movie where not paying attention is the one way to make it tolerable. The story here exists solely to string the special effects together, and even in these terms, it doesn’t do the job well. With the same effort, we could have had a bonkers plot with larger-than-life characters, or a sleazy “slice of life” tale with believably unlikeable antiheroes we would be happy to see get lunched. Failing that, we could at least have had a bunch of idiots as comically inept as the carnosaur fodder in Planet Of Dinosaurs, and perhaps enough gore and/or skin to earn the “Seventies PG” rating. With this cast and story, the only characters who stand out enough to be amusing are the two guys with the boat rental operation, who eventually manage to inject a bit of tragedy. Everything else is just dull filler, apart from an out-of-nowhere robbery/ double murder and car chase. As an extra irritation, what exposition there is consists of several mutually incompatible pseudoscientific “explanations”, notably a meteor that’s made redundant by the cave art.

All of these things might still be tolerable if the movie delivered a decent monster. In reality, this is where it falls far behind even Planet Of Dinosaurs. The obvious difference is that there’s only one monster, which still leaves it within “old school” parameters. The far bigger problem is that they chose an aquatic creature. This too could have been all well and good, if it was using the neck to hoover up boaters and campers on the shore. Instead, almost all the shots of the monster show it lurching on land, so slowly that the victims literally have to freeze in place to remain in danger. What’s most inexcusable is that it’s just not a good monster in design or execution. The shape of the thing is halfway between plesiosaur and pliosaur, an issue suspiciously shared with the Marx Kronosaurus toy. Then the model itself just looks rubbery and overweight, with none of the streamlining that an actual marine reptile would have, very much like a poor copy of Danforth’s already iffy plesiosaur in When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth. The comparison I can’t avoid is with the Archelon in the Harryhausen version of One Million BC, which Harryhausen himself insisted wasn’t intended to be menacing except in size. It all comes crashing down in the finale, where the tractor seems to bump the creature apologetically until it rolls over and dies.

Now for the “one scene”, what stood out to me is the opening scene. After an establishing pan of the landscape with hilarious “eerie” synthesizer music, we meet a character who summons two friends to a mine. He points out that the cave was inhabited by Indians before it was a mine, and casually mentions “all the legends we’ve heard about this place”. He then shows his companions petroglyphs that look like the paint should still be drying, complete with a background of mountains and trees that is almost always missing from the real thing. Then he points to a very detailed, unambiguous and unstylized drawing of a plesiosaur that looks like it came straight from a 1950s picture book. The companion referred to as the doctor declares, “A dinosaur!”, and the guy answers, “Exactly right!”, and even kid me would be shouting. Especially kid me…

In closing, I come as usual to the rating. What’s different here is that this is the first movie I’ve given the “Guinnocent” rating that I really debated much. The minor irony is that this is closer to the kind of movie I came up with the rating for than a number of those I have given it to. That definitely has a lot to do with the shift in what I covered, from obviously incompetent movies like Ingagi and Death Bed to ones that made honestly unconventional choices, notably Earth Girls Are Easy. By comparison, this one shows just enough innate competence for its flaws to look like laziness rather than mere ineptitude, exactly what would put a movie in line for the lowest rating. What stayed my hand was that it at least doesn’t cross the line into offensive stupidity, like Robot Monster, War of the Planets or Inseminoid way back when, and of course, it didn’t provoke me to actually quit like Creepers. The bottom line is, I still don’t quite hate it, and that’s enough to get this one off on a technicality. With that, I’m moving on, and I wish I could say it’s to better things.