#Ossa watches b movies

[carpeossa]

I’m watching Crocodile 2000 and it’s your basic B movie with college students as fodder for the monster.

I haven’t watched it since it first came out when I was a kid, BUT LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING!

It has the perfect prequel potential!

Spoilers for background:

So in 1904* a man named Harlan Clemens created a hotel called The Nile Hotel and imported a massive (at least 30ft or 9m long) Nile crocodile called Flat Dog and made her the main attraction.

[image of the Nile Hotel at night]

Now supposedly this crocodile was descended from the crocodiles that were rode into battle by the Pharaohs (yeah, right, sure there bud).

[image of a mural depicting a man riding a giant Nile crocodile. Mural says: “Flat Dog - The Eighth Wonder of the World - At the Nile Hotel -Nightly]

So Harlan created a shrine dedicated to her and pretty much built a cult around her claiming that she was an avatar for the ancient Egyptian god Sobek**.

Harlan thought that he could harness Sobek’s powers/gain favor by worshipping Flat Dog.

Now, during this time, Flat Dog was able to lay eggs without a mate and this was considered a miracle/divine intervention. ^^

Harlan then took the eggs and displayed them in the hotel lobby, however his 8yo son get mad at Harlan one day and took a croquet mallet to the display case and smashed all of the miracle eggs.

Local legend says that after this, the town learned that Harlan was basically creating a cult, and ran him out of town and in the confusion, Flat Dog escaped into the local estuary. 

But the grandson of Harlan said that Flat Dog killed and ate Harlan for the disrespectful act and later killed Harlan’s son once he became an adult and tried to hunt down Flat Dog in vengeance for killing his father.

[image of Flat Dog exiting a convenience store by breaking down a wall.]

That’s the basic back story to this film and I LOVE IT! Imagine it as its own stand alone movie (just get rid of the historical inaccuracies) set in the early 1900s just before the King Tut craze!

Just some dude getting a giant croc and doing some lines, turning to his sone and saying “you know what, that’s an avatar.”

I like it and give it a thumbs up.

[image of skeleton hand reaching through the grave and giving a thumbs up]

Author notes:

*Movie says that what happened to Harlan occurred 96 years ago and the movie is set to 2000 so 2000 - 96 = 1904).

**Wikipedia says Sobek is a dude, but the film keeps calling him a her so whatever ghoulie; big croc with bad temper is the important message here, ghoul.

^^I’ve tried to find if Nile crocs are capable of parthenogenesis like Komodo dragons or if they can perform long-term-sperm-storage. I found no research that confirms if either biological function occurs in female Nile crocs.

I did learn though that female Nile crocs used to form communal nests in the wild, but it hasn’t been observed since 1952 in Uganda’s Ntoroko peninsula.

Apparently human disturbance contributed to isolated nesting (at least from what I understood).

My phone and tumblr and having a disagreement right now, so I can’t add links of my half way done research into this post (I’m not Roanoke Games) - so here’s a screen shot of the links I used: