Low budget doesn’t always translate to cinematic disaster, but in The Crater Lake Monster, it unfortunately does. I have a soft spot for those who attempt to make movies but don’t succeed the way that they’d hoped. The Crater Lake Monster is poignant in that respect as the production company, Crown International, apparently messed up the financials and insisted on cutting scenes that helped to make a bit more sense of the story. The actors are certainly not those at the top of their game, but the stop-motion plesiosaur isn’t half bad. The story itself doesn’t seem to support its tonnage, however. A meteor crashes into Crater Lake (not the famous one). Some months later a monster begins attacking people after it eats up all the fish. There are a handful of characters who are concerned, and some just casually passing through.
The sheriff, at first skeptical, becomes a believer after seeing with his own eyes. The doctor, who examines a victim’s body, thinks there’s something in the lake. A couple passing through on their way to Vegas see the monster up close and survive, but their trauma is so great that they can’t talk about it. A pair of guys who rent out boats to fishers are having trouble because there’s no fish left. And a pair of archaeologists from “University Extension” insist that the creature should be kept alive since, well, you don’t often come across dinosaurs. They also figure out that the hot meteorite incubated a fertile plesiosaur egg that had been at the bottom of the lake for millions of years. There’s even a story of a liquor-store robber thrown in. The robber’s only tied to the plot by getting eaten by the monster. The monster is finally killed by the sheriff with a bulldozer.
Some of the people that worked on this film, especially the stop-motion crew, had some recognizable chops in the biz. One of them had worked on that childhood Christian kids’ show Davey and Goliath, and another was concurrently working on Star Wars and went on to work on Jurassic Park. Meanwhile, Crater Lake is so bad that it’s a bit surprising that it hasn’t really become a cult classic. Creature features are a guilty pleasure. With a bit of coaxing, and financing, this one might’ve been made passable. Who doesn’t like to see the underdog achieve some success? Of course, it did come out the same year as Star Wars, with its budget, and clearly couldn’t compete down here on Earth.