I've come to expect very little out of the SciFi channel's made for TV movies, but this ranks tight alongside of "Babylon 5: Legend of the Rangers" as am egregious example of how SciFi's clueless network suits can prostitute a great work with an appallingly bad sequel.

I'm a great fan of the original "Lake Placid". David E. Kelly's writing in the original is among the sharpest of any film in memory. It had a delightfully witty script and excellent performances by talented actors. The characters were well textured without a stereotype among them.

By comparison, the script of this film is drek. Thre is almost no wit evident. It's trite and formulaic. The characters are all 2-dimensional stereotypes from central casting. The "special" effects were everything I've come to expect from SciFi channel movies - ham-fisted and amateurish.

I might have given this film a rating of 2 or 3, but for potentially tainting the reputation of the original, I give it a 1 - but only because there's no option to give it a zero!

I enjoyed the first film, it was atmospheric, very witty and had some great performances. This sequel is just bad, it tries hard to repeat the success of the original and fails utterly. The special effects here are incredibly amateurish and the crocodile is not very menacing this time around. The script is more cheesy than funny, flat rather than sharp and hackneyed rather than focused, while the story is unexcitedly-paced and unoriginal with the gory moments predictable rather than nail-biting. The characters are stereotypes and annoying ones at that, and the acting even from Cloris Leachman(whose performance is almost exactly the same as Betty White's in the first film except White was far more inspired) is poor, an uneasy mix of overdone or non-existent. In conclusion, a lame and flaccid sequel to an entertaining original. 1/10 Bethany Cox

LAKE PLACID 2, a straight-to-video follow-up to a lame comedy/horror movie that I absolutely hated, is actually far more fun than it has any right to be. That's because this is a B-movie that doesn't take itself too seriously, while all the while offering up a reasonable quotient of nudity and cheesy gore effects to satisfy the most jaded of viewers.

In this film, residents of a local town are flummoxed when not one, not two, but three, giant crocodiles begin terrorising them from a local lake. Given that this is a low budget production, what it boils down to is a bunch of character roaming the woods and lakeside and getting bumped off one by one by some extremely dodgy-looking CGI effects.

As a whole, LAKE PLACID 2 is shoddily made and there seems to be an awful lot of continuity errors that crept their way into the production. Watch out for the awful-looking CGI plane that randomly disappears in one shot, and one guy's gun changing type in another. The acting is expectedly bad - including from the guy playing the Sheriff, John Schneider, a one-time heart-throb for his leading role in THE DUKES OF HAZZARD - but the effects are even worse, even by genre standards. Still, the cheesy gore effects count for something, and there are a ton of bimbo actresses willing to strip off for guys who like that stuff.