The Crater Lake Monster (1977) -**½

     In the mid-to-late 1970’s, the Loch Ness Monster was having a moment. So was every form of “probably bullshit, but I don’t know— maybe?” weirdness in the world, when you get right down to it, and most of them for the same reason: they were all coming off a decade or more of unprecedented efforts to investigate them scientifically. The rigor of those investigations often left something to be desired, and their findings (especially in the field of cryptozoology) often reeked of wishful thinking, but the mere fact that men in white coats were taking such phenomena seriously enough to inquire into them lent everything from UFOs to the Shroud of Turin an aura of legitimacy which they’d previously lacked. Besides, who wouldn’t want to believe that there was a population of big, weird animals lurking in Loch Ness, even if (and this was my pet theory) they were nothing but a brood of freakishly oversized eels? The most provocative, if least defensible, of the era’s Nessie-hunting expeditions were the ones mounted in 1972 and 1975 by Robert H. Rines, of the Academy of Applied Sciences— and what made them so was the underwater camera rig. Rines equipped his search boat with a submersible camera and floodlight, which he could dunk to the desired depth whenever the boat’s sonar picked up an interesting echo. Mostly what he got was unintelligible pictures of vague, brown blobs, but if you really cranked up your brain’s pattern-recognition systems, some of those blobs looked a bit like tubby torsos, rhomboid flippers, serpentine necks, or, in my personal favorite image of the bunch, a boxy-snouted, Rottweiler-like head with two short, vertical horns, and a bony shelf of brow ridge shielding exactly the kind of miniscule, feeble eyes that you’d expect to find on an animal from an environment where vision was almost useless. The versions of these photos circulated to the press were all heavily retouched to emphasize the details supporting such interpretations, although barely any mention was made of that at the time by either researchers or reporters. If you add up the features which the Rines photos purport to show, they form a silhouette that every schoolkid dinosaur nut would recognize, and thus did pop culture batten unshakably onto what was always the least plausible explanation for the monster-sightings in and around Loch Ness. Henceforth, the phrase “Loch Ness Monster” would automatically conjure images of a relict plesiosaur.

     And that brings us to the funny little micro-genre of monster movies about plesiosaurs living in lakes, where no marine animal ought to be comfortable for any length of time. Some of those were overtly about the Loch Ness Monster, like Larry Buchanan’s The Loch Ness Horror and the stillborn Hammer-Toho co-production, Nessie. (For that matter, you could make a case for including The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, with its plesiosaur-impersonating submarine, in this Loch Ness-specific subset.) But Nessie-inspired sea-lizards could show up anywhere in the 70’s, from Hokkaido to the American Southwest. The Crater Lake Monster was Crown International Pictures’ contribution to the effort. It’s a fairly negligible movie in most respects, wandering lost without a map in the wilderness between Dinosaurus! and Jaws, but it is worth a look as an early effort from David Allen, before he embarked on his long career as Charles Band’s dime store Ray Harryhausen.

     The real Crater Lake is a flooded caldera in the middle of Oregon. The fictional one in this movie, on the other hand, is located about halfway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas if we can judge from the dialogue; the actual shooting location was Lake Huntington, a huge and decidedly un-crater-like reservoir in Fresno County, California. Among the denizens of the lakeshore is Dr. Richard Calkins (Bob Hyman), evidently the neighborhood general practitioner. One bright day in the middle of the night (the day-for-night cinematography in The Crater Lake Monster is worthy of Larry Buchanan), Calkins is out on his porch reading when he’s interrupted by an unexpected visit from his friend, paleontologist Dan Turner (Richard Garrison, from The Zodiac Killer and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master). Turner insists that Calkins accompany him at once to the played-out mine where he and his partner, Susan Patterson (Kacey Cobb), have been digging to see a discovery too amazing to be described. The doctor grumbles a bit, but eventually does as he’s asked— for which cooperation he’s rewarded with a sneak preview of some cave paintings which Susan believes to be over 1000 years old. You might ask what paleontologists want with pre-Columbian petroglyphs, but one of them plainly depicts a party of hunters doing battle with a plesiosaur beneath a gaudy representation of a shooting star. Now the Paiutes didn’t have paleontology a millennium ago, so if they were painting plesiosaurs on the walls of the caves where they worked their shamanic magic, it can only be because they’d actually seen one. Of course, that shouldn’t be possible, because all the Mesozoic sea-lizards, as everyone knows, died alongside the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. Think what a stir it’ll cause when Dan and Susan publicize this discovery— and imagine the even bigger one if they manage to unearth some genuine plesiosaur bones young enough to carbon date! The pair had better not get too attached to those visions, however, because at that very moment, a huge meteor falls to earth in Crater Lake, and the resulting tremors collapse the tunnel where they’d been working. They and Dr. Calkins are lucky to escape from the cave-in with their lives. Even Dan and Susan’s hoped-for consolation prize— to salvage the meteor from the lakebed— will have to wait, because when they dive in search of it the following morning, they find it still much too hot to be moved, and likely to remain so for weeks.

     There’s absolutely nothing to indicate that the remainder of act one unfolds over a period of six months until one of the characters comes right out and says so around the start of act two. It’s important that we understand that, though, or none of the hints dropped for us to explain how we get from Point A to Point B will reveal their intended significance. What’s supposed to have happened is that the frigid waters of Crater Lake have preserved a clutch of plesiosaur eggs since Mesozoic times, and that the heat from the meteor has incubated one of them, just as the shooting star shown in the cave painting must have 1000 years ago. And it’s supposed to be the first sign of a fast-growing monster taking up residence in the lake when the fish stocks are decimated, but the way that information is sprung on us initially makes it sound like the only people who had ever been dumb enough to try fishing there in the first place were rich city-slickers. It’s much more informative when a cattle rancher named Ferguson (Joe Sasway) calls county sheriff Steve Hanson (Richard Caradella) to report the “theft” of his bull. Inevitably, humans start disappearing, too, around the same time, generally after renting boats from comic relief redneck nitwits Arnie Chabot (Glen Roberts, of The Evictors) and Mitch Kowalski (Mark Siegel). But since most of the missing are from out of town— U.S. Senator Jack Fuller (Marv Eliot), touring stage magician Ross Conway (Michael F. Hoover) and his wife (Suzanne Lucas), an alcoholic stickup man from Vegas (Sonny Shepard)— it takes a while for their absence to be felt, even when they survive their encounters with the monster. It’s the Conways who tell Hanson what attacked them out on the lake, and the drunk gunman whose death gives the sheriff occasion to see the creature in action. Hanson turns to Calkins at that point for advice and assistance, and Calkins introduces him to Dan and Susan. Even then, however, there’s a marked lack of agreement regarding what to do about the plesiosaur in the lake. Hanson naturally thinks only of killing it before it eats anybody else. Dan, Susan, and the doctor would prefer to see it taken alive and studied. And the comic relief redneck nitwits view the Crater Lake Monster as a get-rich-quick opportunity for the entire little community.

     Producer/writer/director William R. Stromberg had never worked on a feature film in any of those capacities prior to The Crater Lake Monster, nor would he ever do so again. That may be the very least surprising thing about this movie. Indeed, nobody involved with The Crater Lake Monster has much of a resumé doing whatever they did here, with the obvious exception of David Allen, and the world is surely none the poorer for it. What’s weird, though, is that Stromberg and quite a few of the castmembers went on to work in visual effects. It’s as if everybody came out of this production recognizing that Allen’s work on it was the only aspect that was worth a shit, and got inspired to try their hands at something in the same vein.

     I don’t think it takes a serious stop-motion aficionado, either, to appreciate that the monster itself is the main reason to watch this film. The plesiosaur shows just how much attention Allen had been paying as part of Jim Danforth’s team on When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. First off, this is one of the rare cases before Jurassic Park in which a special effects artist tasked with resurrecting a prehistoric animal sweated the details on things like skull morphology, instead of settling for getting the overall body form impressionistically correct. Allen also plainly absorbed the most important lesson to be learned from the examples of Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen, that the greatest virtue of stop-motion (or any form of hands-on animation, for that matter) is its capacity for imparting character to the things being animated. The Crater Lake Monster has less personality than King Kong or Kasim the baboon, naturally enough, but it’s as memorably individual as can plausibly be asked of a mere swimming lizard. Heaven knows it makes a stronger and more favorable impression than any of the humans in the cast!

     All that said, there’s something charming about The Crater Lake Monster’s weird haplessness, as is often the case with Crown International movies. Take the armed robber subplot as a representative example. We suddenly just find ourselves in this guy’s company without a word of warning or explanation, hundreds of miles from the site of the main action. He rolls out of bed, discovers that he’s all out of booze, and then goes down the street to rob his favorite liquor store, fatally shooting two people in the process. Then he drives away, and we don’t see him again for several scenes running. At this point, we have no fucking idea who this guy is, or why Stromberg just wasted five minutes of our time with him. Then he returns, again without warning or explanation, in the vicinity of Crater Lake, and engages Sheriff Hanson in what has to be the only chase between a Rambler Marlin and a Buick Sport Wagon in the annals of cinema, finally winding up between the jaws of the plesiosaur. Truly it’s the kind of thing that only someone who had never written or directed a movie before would do. The same goes for Stromberg’s mad decision to sideline all three of the characters introduced in the opening scene for the greater bulk of the film, and for his even madder one to devote most of his attention throughout to the insufferable Arnie and Mitch. Forget, for the moment, the utter repellence of those two, both as people and as delivery systems for DOA jokes. Even if they were charismatic and funny, they still wouldn’t serve any function until the final scene except to rent out-of-towners the boats on which they become plesiosaur chow. Even the makers of Blood Beach understood that when you’re making a monster movie, you focus on the people who are trying to do something about the monster! On the other hand, there is one time when Stromberg’s untutored approach to filmmaking leads him to devise something genuinely badass. I defy you to find any other movie that pits a plesiosaur against a snowcat for the final battle.

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