Lake Placid vs Anaconda (2015)

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Giant crocodiles go head to head with giant anacondas. The new town Sheriff must find a way to destroy the two species' before they kill the whole town.

REVIEW: SyFy's Lake Placid sequel series is one of my favorite Made-for-TV movie franchises. Their Anaconda sequels however, I really don’t like much. Lake Placid vs Anaconda, sadly, falls closer in line with the Anaconda sequels for me than their Lake Placid ones.


Lake Placid vs Anaconda is definitely more Lake Placid-centric, with Anaconda ties to it, then an even mix. It even has Yancy Butler returning again from Lake Placid 3 and 4 (this time being upgraded to town Sheriff because nobody else wanted the job after the events of the last several movies - ha!) and Robert Englund is also back again, somehow surviving his death in the previous Lake Placid movie. On the Anaconda characters side, there are no returning characters but we do have the daughter of John Rhys-Davies' character taking his place in the company and leading this experiment (which of course gets out of hand and causes the snakes to get loose around the lakes from the Lake Placid movies, although after the opening scene the snakes don't show back up again until far into the movie, another reason why this feels more Lake Placid than Anaconda).

Unfortunately, the special effects are a huge step down from the previous Lake Placid movies and are more in line with Anaconda 3 and 4's level, minus a couple shots and moments where they actually looked quite good. Add to that the acting from everyone that isn't Yancy Butler or the one rebellious sorority girl is atrocious in this entry, plus the overall movie is just...well...not very interesting during most of the portions following the Anaconda side of the story. Don't get me wrong, the animal attack scenes are still quite fun, especially when the two animal types attack each other, but the portions of the movie focusing on the human characters that are not Yancy Butler and her deputy are just a slog to get through and unfortunately, there's a lot of that here.


For a team-up movie where I love the Lake Placid SyFy franchise and don't care for the Anaconda one, I was happy to see, story-wise, this movie was focused more on the Lake Placid stuff, however tone-wise it felt more like the Anaconda ones, which disappoints me.

5/10 rooms in the Psych Ward 

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