Lake Placid

Lake Placid (1999) is a creature feature with a comic streak you can watch online on iFILM. A calm lake in the Maine woods stops being calm when a diver gets bitten clean in half while the sheriff watches from the boat.

The investigation pulls together a mismatched crew. There's a local fish-and-game officer (Bill Pullman), a New York paleontologist (Bridget Fonda) who hates getting her boots muddy, a loud sheriff (Brendan Gleeson), and a wealthy crocodile obsessive (Oliver Platt) who'd love nothing more than to meet the thing up close. Plus the sweet old woman on the lakeshore farm, played by Betty White with a mouth that makes everyone flinch. The culprit turns out to be a saltwater crocodile the size of a bus — an animal that has no business being this far north.

David E. Kelley wrote it, and there's nearly more bickering than blood; the characters snap at each other more than at the reptile. Director Steve Miner doesn't reach for anything grand — it's a tight eighty-minute monster movie that trades scares for laughs and back again. Pure popcorn. Stream Lake Placid (1999) online on iFILM.