Rating: B-
Dir: Fugui.
Star: Xiong Xinxin, Chen Guanying, Wei Xiao, Tang Qiaojia.
My expectations for this one were, considering the same director had given us Mega Crocodile, which was distinctly underwhelming, particularly in the effects department. This is considerably better, and for a while looked like it might rival Anaconda as my favourite When Chinese Animals Attack movie. It couldn’t quite sustain that – though at 103 minutes, when most of these run no more than eighty, this is probably the Gone With the Wind of WCAA films. Rather than a sequel, it cranks the clock back close to a hundred years, to 1925. The crocodile escapes while being carried on a train – which may raise more questions than it answers – and after a brief rampage through the carriages, ends up in the nearby city of Beihai.
After a massacre at a marriage ceremony (top), while the orchestra plays the Wedding March, the local police chief goes full Jaws and brings in renowned hunter Seventh Brother Orion (Xiong) and his apprentice Tian Sheng (Chen), to track down the beast. They are initially successful, albeit after a bit of a running joke about everyone except them in the city encountering the creature. Orion managing to drug the beast. Everyone is happy… until he notices the crocodile he captured is male, while the one which attacked the wedding was female. The police chief is having none of this, and preparations go full steam ahead for the wedding of the son of a local official to his new bride, Zhao Ling Er (Wei), a blind newspaper seller.
There are complications. She’ll be his fourth wife, the previous ones having quickly died off in mysterious circumstance, and Tian has fallen for her. It probably doesn’t take a crystal ball to figure out where this is going. Croc #2 shows up at the wedding – it really hates the institution of marriage, apparently – is highly unhappy to discover its mate is on the menu, and Orion and Tian have been locked up, so first must escape before confronting the beast. I liked the urban setting here: it’s a nice change from the usual jungle or wilderness locations. The effects are occasionally ropey: the bites seem more like nibbles. But at least it is interacting with the humans – mostly by chucking them through windows – rather than them simply staring at and reacting to it.
The stuff about the local bureaucrat being an opium addict and, indeed, most of the stuff leading up to the wedding, isn’t particularly interesting. It may be an attempt to dig at corrupt local officialdom, in the days before the glorious revolution swept away all those running dog lackeys of capitalism. Me, I’m here for the rampaging reptiles, so wasn’t interested in sociopolitical commentary or romance: this might have been better at normal WCAA length. Some moments made me go “Eh?”, such as the groom at the first wedding clearly being killed by a cleaver. Is the croc using tools? However, there’s plenty of good stuff here. Particular credit to director Fugui (I guess he’s the Chinese equivalent of McG?), who addressed many of the shortcomings from the original, and the end product improved significantly as a result.
This review is part of our feature, When Chinese Animals Attack.