aka The Crocodile; The Million Dollar Crocodile
(Ban Wan Ju E)
China. 2012.
Crew
Director – Lin Lisheng, Screenplay – Lin Lisheng, Ma Hua & Ma Yu, Producer – Li Rui, Music – Dong Dongdong, Visual Effects Supervisor – Gao Yuan, Art Direction – An Bin. Production Company – Beijing Geliang Media Co., Ltd./Johnny Film (Shanghai) Co., Ltd./Fangtawild Films Co., Ltd..
Young Wang Xiaoxing’s grandfather Liu Guang Tou runs the Lius Crocodile Park in Zhejiang. Xiaoxing’s favourite is the eight-meter-long crocodile called Amao. However, an impoverished Liu is faced with closure and is forced to sell his crocodiles to Zhao Dazui, who intends to kill them to sell for meat. As Dazui and his lackeys take Amao away, it makes an escape. Meanwhile, Wen Yan splits up with her boyfriend and walks away from his car. Just as she passes through a field, she is attacked by Amao. She succeeds in climbing a pole only for the crocodile to swallow her purse containing her life savings, 100,000 Euros. Yan struggles to get Xiaoxing’s father, the local police officer Wang Beiji, to take her seriously and stop the crocodile so she can retrieve her money. Various parties congregate trying either to stop the threat of the giant crocodile or else obtain Wen Yan’s money.
A few years before Croczilla came out, there was a spate of killer crocodile films with the likes of Black Water (2007), Primeval (2007) and Rogue (2007), as well as other B-budget copies such as Croc (2007), Lake Placid 2 (2007) and Supercroc (2007). Croczilla feels as though it could have been a straggler in the fad, except for the fact that it gives the impression of having been made by China as some kind of prestige production intended for international sales. This seems particularly evident from the credits where where the actors come from is even listed in parentheses after their name.
I didn’t have a subtitled version of Croczilla to watch – the ideal way for me – and the only copy available was one that had been dubbed into English. And this unfortunately killed the film for me. It is the sort of dubbing that used to be languished on martial arts films in the 1970s – where the villains are voiced as lazy and stupid and most of the Asian characters are given racist sing-song voices or, as Guo Tao’s hero is here, nicknames like Wong Way Wong.
Ding Jiali and Barbie Hsu tied up before the crocodile
Almost all of the characters in the film are portrayed as comic caricatures – Lam Suet as the stupid, ignorant and greedy criminal; Wang Jingsong as a comically nerdy insurance agent; and Barbie Hsu as the girl who does nothing except bitch and complain. However, the more the film went on, the more I began to realise that this was not a problem created solely by the dubbing – that in fact this is the way that the characters were conceived and intended to be by the filmmakers even before Croczilla was dubbed. In fact, these comic caricatures almost take over and dominate the film – it is a long way in before any of the characters actually gets eaten by the crocodile. Even the scenes near the end with Lam Suet and his idiotic compatriots hunting the crocodile feature comic scenes with them armed with useless items like ladles or a fishing net they trip over as they walk through the jungle.
In about the last third of the show, Croczilla ditches the comedy and becomes quite reasonable. One plus of the film is that the CGI effects for the crocodile are fairly good. And there are some not too bad scenes chasing the crocodile along a riverbed in a jeep, or with Barbie Hsu and young Ding Jiali being strung up as bait by villain Lam Suet. Especially good are the scenes out on the boat with Shi Zhaoqi trying to lure the crocodile up onto land – the best parts here are when Shi Zhaoqi acts as a crocodile whisperer and lures it into calming down and lying on the grass, all by doing nothing except using gestures and a staff.
