Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Julian R. White I mean hey, this movie had a very low budget, and I have to hand it to them, they did quite well with what they had. However, I wouldn't say that makes this a good movie. The plot isn't so bad, but it leaves many assumptions to be made. Not to mention when a cop sees a meteor crash into a lake, you'd expect him to say or do more than come over the radio and just be like "a giant fire ball just crashed into the lake I guess, we should call the forest rangers". I mean, nonchalant much? The best part of the film of course is the monster, stop motion all the way in 1977? You're kidding! It's extremely obvious in many parts of the film that the cameras and equipment used are not professional equipment, and the plot tends to switch between a menacing monster, and two drunks who get into mischief. Overall the film had a lot of potential, but it could have been so much better.

swedzin I kind of enjoy these low budget monster movies, but this one, I didn't find very enjoyable. As per usual… a few scientist found a cave near The Crater Lake (that doesn't even look like crater lake, it doesn't even resemble to any of them). There they saw a caveman paintings, that presents a tribe fighting a dinosaur (sounds like a creationist wet dream if you ask me…). During their research, a meteor fell into a lake, and… nothing special happened about it… it was forgotten during the movie course. Just to make room for a Plesiosaur like monster to come out of the lake and start terrorizing people all over the small county. So… the meteor is forgotten, and no one is asking questions about it? OK, move on. Obviously, the director of the film William Stromberg and the writer/leading actor Richard Cardella were inspired by Loch Ness monster. Yep, it's one of 'those' movies.Let's start with the plot/script: It's pretty lame, very limp story, just an excuse to see a large stop-motion monster eating people alive. The characters are so weak, they are not properly developed, they are just moving around and you can just easily guess who is next for dinner. Actors are bad, so uninterested in their performance, or the film, just talking feebly and watching the floor… they were just pathetic meat sacks that talked, no emotions, noting. The monster effects were… well, stop motion was pretty much solid, while from close, the big toy head was used, and that was so fake. The monster sound effects were also pretty solid. The music score was nothing special, it's just funnily intense, I remember an intense piano, like some drunken cat is jumping on the keyboards… Richard Cardella plays the sheriff, with that lame performance, he looks like he doesn't give a damn about his little mountain town.HERE COMES SPOILERS: There are few scenes… and I just can't resist to tell you about them. First of all, the film suddenly jumps from it's main plot to a totally different subplot. It's about some ugly, mustache hobo, who robbed the store and than headed to a crater lake, just to get eaten by a monster. Karma's a bitch, right? And that's the moment where sheriff started to suspect about something weird in the lake. The next scene is just there to give us a rush towards the end of the film, it's about sheriff returning to the lake, on the same location where that ugly hobo was eaten, just to suddenly confront a monster. And the last one is a… let's call it a dramatic duel between a sheriff and a monster. While sheriff is driving a big heavy equipment vehicle, he use it to defeat the monster. And, I could easily say that this is perhaps a first time, maybe, a first time to see main star using a large machine to defeat a large monster. Just like in Aliens (1986) and a shameless Aliens rip off Carnosaur 2 (1995). Maybe I'm wrong…SPOILER ENDS.So, don't come near this film, it's bad, boring, lame, it doesn't apply to your mind, it just repel off your head. Nothing special happens… just boring, boring stuff. Skip this one, and find something more interesting, or more ridiculous.

ferbs54 My bad, and all that, but for some reason, I had long assumed "The Crater Lake Monster" was a product of the late 1950s--a black-and-white cousin of such other films dealing with thawed-out critters returning to harass modern man as "The Monster That Challenged the World" (1957) and "The Monster of Piedras Blancas" (1959). Of course, I was incorrect in that surmise, and the picture in question turns out to be from the year 1977, and filmed in beautiful supersaturated color, to boot. Still, this film's heart seems to be very much with the great sci-fi pictures that had been produced two decades earlier. A minor and modest entertainment at best, it yet succeeds as a pastiche of its '50s antecedents, and indeed, had it been filmed in B&W and featured some vintage automobiles, might have been able to fool many other folks as to its year of birth.In the film, coscreenwriter Richard Cardella plays Sheriff Steve Hanson, who is in charge of the peaceful, picturesque little town of Crater Lake, somewhere between L.A. and Las Vegas. The plummeting of a sparkling meteorite into the local lake spells big trouble for Hanson, the townsfolk and some visiting tourists, however, as the superhot chunk of space junk soon warms up the lake's waters and acts as an incubator of sorts for a plesiosaur egg that had long lain dormant in its icy depths. And before long, a fully grown plesiosaur--think of the head and body of a brontosaurus, but substitute seallike flippers for the legs--with a decidedly nasty disposition and a hunger for meat is seen waddling and chomping its way through the area! It would seem as if Hanson, along with the town's doc, a visiting archaeologist and his girlfriend, and the area's two doofus boat renters, Arnie and Mitch, will have their hands very full, eliminating--and perhaps even capturing--the prehistoric menace...."A beast more terrifying than your most frightening nightmare," the original trailer for "The Crater Lake Monster" proclaimed, and while this amusing bit of hyperbole is of course patent nonsense, the film's creature nonetheless is a most pleasing creation. Brought to life via Harryhausen-like stop-motion animation courtesy of David W. Allen, the plesiosaur is fairly awesome to behold, and to the film's credit, we do not have to wait more than 15 minutes before getting our initial glimpse. (I always got impatient, when I was a kid, if a film withheld that first look for too long, and I suppose I haven't changed much!) The creature looks most impressive every time we see it, even when director/coscreenwriter William R. Stromberg gives us a long shot of the lake, with only the monster's head and neck briefly emerging from it. Indeed, the entire film LOOKS just fine, with rich colors and lovely scenery (the picture makes nice use of its Huntington Lake and Palomar Mountain, California, locales), shown to good advantage on its current Rhino DVD incarnation. As for the film's acting...well, I'm not saying that the Academy egregiously overlooked anybody here, but the thesping is nonetheless better than you might expect. Cardella, in the lead role, is especially good as the befuddled, tough, scared but dependably capable sheriff; indeed, an unexpectedly charismatic portrayal from this relatively unknown actor. Anyway, those are the film's not inconsiderable virtues, which are, unfortunately, counterbalanced by a goodly share of drawbacks.It's hard to put a finger on any one reason, but "Crater Lake Monster" exudes that indefinable sense of an amateur effort, albeit a very skilled one, and featuring those excellent FX. As detailed on a certain Wiki site, the film had a troubled production vis-a-vis financing, and I suppose that all involved did the best they could under the circumstances. The picture features some blatantly goofy humor, thanks to those cracker-barrel numskulls Mitch and Arnie (we get to see the two argue constantly, fight, toss each other in the lake, get drunk, stumble around in the woods, etc.), but these scenes also allow us to get to know the characters better, and thus to actually worry about them when they are in peril. What is worse than the inane humor is the ease with which the plesiosaur is ultimately dispatched; a horribly rushed, unbelievable and anticlimactic denouement that should leave very few viewers satisfied. And then there is the matter of time elapsed in the film. We are told at one point that it had been six months since the meteorite plunged into Crater Lake, although there is absolutely no way for the viewer to have realized this; indeed, all the occurrences in the film seem to transpire over the duration of around 72 hours. So yes, the film most certainly is a minor effort, and a mixed bag at best, but still most undeserving of the lowest "BOMB" rating that the wet blankets at "Maltin's Movie Guide" have chosen to bestow on it. The film is especially perfect for the kiddies and those with an abiding love for 1950s monster fare, not to mention those who are suckers for stop-motion FX. In all, a nice try, from a group of filmmakers whose heart was certainly in the right place....

Mark Honhorst ...and it is this film. I imagine that if indeed there is a negative afterlife, damned souls are tied to a rather uncomfortable couch and forced to watch this movie on a continuous loop for all eternity. Okay, maybe it's not that bad, but it is probably the worst film I have ever seen next to "Manos, the Hands of Fate"... and I have seen a lot of bad movies, believe you me. This is just a crummy B movie, bad film-making at it's finest(or is it worst?) The thing I really didn't like about this movie is the moronic duo they threw in for comedy relief. Now, a little comedy relief is a good thing, but most of the movie is focused on the adventures of these two morons, rather than on the "heroes" of this film, who are actually in it for less time than them! To be fair, Crown International really destroyed the movie by adding bad music and doing a poor job editing. But honestly, this was probably a bad film to begin with, so Crown really couldn't have done that much to hurt it. This really needs to be in the bottom 100 list. I wouldn't wish this one on my worst enemy. Actually, it's my kind of campy B movie. It was bad, but I still liked it, despite my one star rating.