Director – Scott Harper, Screenplay – Steve Bevilacqua, Story/Producer – David Michael Latt, Photography – Steven Parker, Music – Eliza Swenson, Visual Effects – Sharper Effects, Production Design – John Karyus. Production Company – The Asylum.
Cast
Cynthia Rose Hall (Private Celia Perez), Matthew Blashaw (Captain Joe Lynch), Kim Little (Dr Leah Perrot), David Novak (General McFadden), Kristen Quintrall (Henche), Marat Glazer (Major Faulk), Noel Thurman (Reynolds), Allen Duncan (Quinn), Michael Tower (McCoy)
Plot
A small team of soldiers is on patrol in Lake Padres National Park area of California. They then come under attack by a giant crocodile over a hundred feet long. Private Celia Perez is the only survivor of the attack. Other soldiers are quickly deployed but none of the fire power they use manages to stop the crocodile as it heads on towards Oxnard and then Los Angeles.
The Asylum has become a prolific low-budget production company since the mid-2000s. They produce a mountain of disaster and monster movies. The two niches they are most associated with is the gonzo killer shark film, having created the bad movie hit of Sharknado (2013) and assorted sequels and other works in a similar vein. That and their production of Mockbusters – films that come out with titles intended to mimic those of big-budget releases in the hope that people will mistake them or not look too closely.
Supercroc was one of The Asylum’s earliest mockbusters. It came out three months after the release of the giant killer crocodile film Primeval (2007). That was a big-budget studio release, although what ended up stealing all the attention that year was in fact two independent Australian-made crocodile films Black Water (2007) and Greg McLean’s Rogue (2007).
Supercroc was made early on back when The Asylum were still working out their game. They released their first mockbuster only two years earlier with War of the Worlds (2005) but had released some fifteen other mockbusters by this point during which they had discovered their mockbuster formula. Key personnel – David Michael Latt, David Rimawi – are present, although are covering more bases than their usual producer roles – Latt also comes up with the story. There is no in-house effects team and the work has been shipped to an outside company Sharper Effects.
The Supercroc attacks
The CGI in most of The Asylum’s earlier films was fairly ropey, which earned them a bad name. To be fair, the work here is actually quite serviceable for the most part. The Supercroc looks quite impressive as it moves about, particularly during the march on Los Angeles. The scene that does not work due to inadequate effects is the one where the crocodile reaches up into the sky to tear down a helicopter.
The film is passably formulaic, but merely and nothing particularly memorable. My major quibble is that in the version I saw the dialogue level was low to the point of frequently inaudible as to what was being said, while some of the dialogue scenes also end up being overrun by the music.
Director Scott Harper has worked on visual effects with assorted A-budget films since the 1990s, including Mortal Kombat (1995), The Nutty Professor (1996) and What Dreams May Come (1998), among many others. He graduated to director with Supercroc and went on to make one other film for The Asylum with AVH: Alien vs Hunter (2007) after which he appears to have retired.
