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A Study in Monster-Movie Tropes: Lake Placid vs. Anaconda

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A Study in Monster-Movie Tropes: <i>Lake Placid vs. Anaconda</i>

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A Study in Monster-Movie Tropes: Lake Placid vs. Anaconda

We're looking at another classic and beloved B-movie trope: the monster mashup.

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Published on January 27, 2025

Credit: Syfy

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Image of a CGI crocodile from the TV movie Lake Placid vs Anaconda

Credit: Syfy

Every genre has its tropes. Tropes are the elements that help define the genre. They set up expectations; they make promises that the reader or viewer or player is in for this kind of ride, this style of adventure, this type of entertainment.

It’s even more fun if the tropes are self-aware. They’re a set of in-jokes, and we’re all in on it. We scream at the jump-scares, but then we laugh. Gotcha!

Lake Placid vs. Anaconda is a peak tropefest. It puts the cap on not one but two genre film series. We’ve seen one of the Anaconda films—there were four as of 2015. Number five is also number five in another monster series, Lake Placid, which afflicts a small town in Maine with an ongoing plague of giant killer crocodiles. It’s another classic and beloved trope, the monster mashup.

This entry in the combined sagas features familiar faces from the world of genre films. Corin Nemec stars as the Fish and Wildlife guy, Yancy Butler is the hardass sheriff, and the immortal Robert Englund is the battle-scarred mercenary who’s lost a few pieces of his anatomy since the last installment of the Lake Placid franchise. There’s always a Fish and Wildlife guy, a beleaguered sheriff, and one or more battered warrior types. There’s also a feckless mayor, an evil corporation headed by an evil plutocrat—in this case, young, female, glossy, and sneeringly wicked—and her evil minions, and inevitably, a gaggle of nubile young things in as little clothing as possible. The sooner they get into their bikinis, the better.

Of course there’s gore. It’s not just the adult giant killer crocodiles who reduce the bit players to blood spatters and random body parts; it’s the swarms of baby killer crocodiles. That’s not even counting the giant killer snakes, which take a while to join the party. We know from the beginning that they’re out there, having escaped from their evil corporate lab, but the focus early on is on the crocodiles. And the bikinis and the sorority girls and the screaming.

The sorority girls and their frat-boy allies are a trope all their own. It’s rush week down at the college, and Mean Head Sorority Girl and her Mean Sorority Sidekick are leading a caravan of pledges to Clear Lake for a day of sun, sand, and hazing. The pledges are all dewy-eyed, gorgeous, and gifted with fine pairs of lungs for screaming and running, and one is Fish and Wildlife guy’s daughter.

He makes that very clear. She has a name, but he doesn’t use it. She’s “my daughter.” She belongs to him. She’s his offspring. That’s her value to him and the plot. She gives him motivation and a mission. Not just to save the town but to save his own personal private female family member. It’s the save the girl/save the world trope, small-town edition.

As for the monsters, neither species of which belongs anywhere near Aroostook County, Maine (as played by British Columbia—I’m actually from Maine, the trees aren’t right), the crocodiles have been there for a while, confined to a reserve where they’ve been breeding happily and prolifically. (We aren’t, in this episode, told how they manage to get through Maine winters.) The anacondas are a new introduction thanks to the evil corporation we’ve met in previous installments of the Blood Orchid saga.

It’s all about the Blood Orchid and its connection to the giant, infinitely regenerating anaconda. The flower’s magic chemical works beautifully on anacondas, and Evilcorp has managed to formulate a serum by combining the magic chemical with “the particular secretions of a molting giant anaconda” as Evilcorp’s CEO puts it, but unfortunately it’s lethal to humans. However, Evilcorp CEO late father found a solution: create a hybrid, a super-reptile.

The cross can’t be just any reptile. Only one, equally rare species is compatible with the giant anaconda. It’s none other than the giant killer crocodile of Black Lake, Maine. And there Evilcorp’s scientists are, up in the Maine woods with a lab truck, a giant crocodile, and three giant anacondas—until the monsters break loose, the fence around the crocodile reserve comes down, and the woods flood with killer crocodiles of all ages and sizes, and three very unhappy, very large, very non-native snakes.

The mayhem escalates from there. The crocodiles are hungry and the woods are full of soft tasty humans. The anacondas are both hungry and pissed off. They’re gigantic, they’re fast, and they can whip into coils around a vehicle or a human or a crocodile in a couple of seconds flat. It’s war among the trees and blood in the water, and plenty of bikini-clad bodies to keep the core viewership watching.

The war trope gets ample air time. There’s an assortment of weaponry including an epically ineffective helicopter, and much banging and shooting and blowing things up. The warriors who wield the weapons bicker and strut and parade their machismo. The women are especially vicious, and particularly to each other.

This is not a celebration of female friendship. As Reba the sheriff says, “I don’t have any friends.” None of the other women do either, including the sorority sisters, who have minions, allies, and rivals, but nothing like actual friends. The one real attachment any of them has is to her daddy. It’s patriarchy all the way down, even when it’s giving us Strong Female Characters and female authority figures.

The monsters are huge, as monsters need to be, and malevolent, which is what makes them monsters. In this fantasy world, anacondas can grow to humongous size on land without needing the support of water to keep their inner organs from collapsing under their own weight. They can be permeated with magic orchid chemical, which makes them effectively immortal. And their powers of constriction and ingestion of prey are nearly instantaneous, with bonus gore: instead of strangling their prey and then slowly swallowing it whole, they pop it like a bubble.

They also have managed, somehow, to become egg-layers. Unlike realworld anacondas, which give birth to live young, the female monster lays her clutch of hybridized eggs in the woods.

This is the worst-case scenario, according to Evilcorp’s CEO. It’s the classic horror trope, the ending that isn’t. The monster of the day may be blown to smithereens, but the evil lives on—and what’s coming next will be even worse. Not just killer crocodiles or giant immortal snakes, but the ultimate, the invincible: the Crocaconda.

The last thing we see is the little horror bursting out of its egg in the middle of a nest—with nineteen more eggs around it. Snaky body and head, crocodile teeth, and, presumably, infinite powers of regeneration. Our hybrid monster is immortal.

That leaves the door open for another sequel, which has yet to materialize. I can imagine how it would go. Evilcorp is back, hunting the Crocaconda with visions of billions in profits as it finally, for real this time, puts its immortality serum on the market. But the monster fights back, and it may have help. Somebody will want to save the town, and somebody else may want to save the monster—though that never ends well.

Monsters are monstrous by definition. They attack and destroy and kill, and it’s the heroes’ job to stop them. Preferably with lots of weapons and some big explosions.

And then they come back. Again and again. Forever and ever. Monsters never truly die. That’s the fundamental truth of the monster movie. icon-paragraph-end

About the Author

Judith Tarr

Author

Judith Tarr has written over forty novels, many of which have been published as ebooks, as well as numerous shorter works of fiction and nonfiction, including a primer for writers who want to write about horses: Writing Horses: The Fine Art of Getting It Right. She has a Patreon, in which she shares nonfiction, fiction, and horse and cat stories. She lives near Tucson, Arizona, with a herd of Lipizzans, a clowder of cats, and a pair of Very Good Dogs.
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