Lake Placid: Legacy is a pretty funny title for a film. What is the “legacy” of the Lake Placid franchise? I remember the original film on the odd Blockbuster shelf or low-rent cable channel, but does it really have a legacy? Turns out, Lake Placid has been quietly dumping sequels onto the Sci-Fi or Syfy channel since 2007. The sixth entry crawled its way onto the top ten most-watched list on Paramount+. Finally, the quietest horror franchise in the world sticks its head through the water and emits an otherworldly hiss.
Lake Placid: Legacy Drags Paramount+ Into the Swamp
Every Lake Placid film is about the various dangers of crocodiles. The long history of animal attack movies coincidentally contains many of the worst horror films ever made. If you can think of an animal, someone has made an unconvincing version of it to attack someone on camera. Shark films remain the go-to example, but every predator is available for an identical project. These things come in tiers, with Jaws at the top and Jaws: The Revenge near the bottom. The sixth Lake Placid movie is near the lower end, but there is plenty of garbage to keep it from the lowest depths. Alexandre Aja’s 2019 film Crawl is a near-perfect how-to guide on movies about killer reptiles. It probably cost enough to make ten more Lake Placid movies, but a little panache goes a long way. Instead, Legacy offers just enough crocodile violence and one actor from The Matrix.
I think the thing that’s most interesting about the Lake Placid franchise is its complete secrecy. Imagine if you found out Arachnophobia, or Bats, or Orca had five sequels no one had ever heard of. It’s hilarious to see Sony still mindlessly slapping the name on movies no one would typically watch in the vague hope of someone confusing it for the original. Sure enough, the trick seems to have worked. Lake Placid: Legacy is in Paramount+’s monthly top ten, meaning that it’s been one of the service’s biggest hits for over 27 days. Its success comes almost exclusively from viewers in Latin America. The same viewers could use the same subscription to watch A Quiet Place: Day One, Smile, Drag Me To Hell, or, of course, Crawl. There aren’t a ton of great options, so I see why the film is doing well there.
Lake Placid: Legacy isn’t even the worst unknown horror prequel on Paramount+. The service funded and proudly presented Pet Sematary: Bloodlines. Lake Placid and its many pointless sequels are all the same thing. They’re bargain-bin animal attack movies in which CGI crocodiles tear performers apart as punishment for phoning in their performances. There are a million entries just like it on Syfy and elsewhere. On the other hand, it’s a grim reminder of what every company might eventually do with their beloved IP when it stops producing enough value. How long before Sony starts trotting their Spider-Man movies straight to the Syfy channel?
