Everybody knows that science is the darkest of dark arts. Like a powerful but untrustworthy djinn, Mother Science grants us our inventions and innovations but then unleashes terrifying unforeseen consequences. We’ve seen this happen again and again: You want to clone an extinct animal? Guess what, a T-Rex just ate San Diego. Communicate with an extraterrestrial race? Whoops, a sexy femalien just busted her tongue through the back of your skull. Develop nanotechnology to, I don’t know, cure cancer? Hate to break it to you, but a swarm of nanobots just erupted from a crashed satellite, invaded a Bulgarian zoo, and transformed a crocodile into a terrible CGI robot with a thirst for murder. When will we learn?
Friends, that last example was more than just a chilling hypothetical. It was also the premise of RoboCroc, Syfy’s most thought-provoking cautionary tale since Sharknado. Don’t let the cryptic symbolism of the title fool you, RoboCroc is actually about a robotic crocodile. Depending on your definition of the word documentary, RoboCroc is a documentary that stars Parker Lewis from Parker Lewis Can’t Lose (Corin Nemec) as a “suave zookeeper” who butts heads with the mom from E.T. (Dee Wallace) when her government-created nanobots turn his favorite crocodile into a robot that goes on a rampage in a Bulgarian zoo-slash-waterslide-park-slash-ATV-course. In other words, RoboCroc is an important film. Here are its nine best moments!
After what felt like hours and hours of boring setup involving space debris and a dead-eyed Parker Lewis flirting with a sexy lady biologist, the first interesting thing to happen in RoboCroc was when a drunken fisherman ambled into a lagoon and got ATE. But if we’re being real, the most surprising thing about this scene was the revelation that somewhere there exists a zoo where people can go fishing. Man, that’s some next-level zoo stuff. Did this zoo also have a bear exhibit that allowed patrons to throw razor Frisbees? RoboCroc didn’t say.
What this zoo DID have was an ATV track. And as it turned out, RoboCrocs do NOT care for this particular outdoor activity.
Meanwhile, at the zoo’s waterslide park, a loose RoboCroc chased away dozens of pasty, doughy Bulgarian extras until only a few American-accented teens remained, one of whom was Parker Lewis’s son, a sort of malnourished Justin Bieber type. Anyway, in this scene the resident teen bully got ate up by RoboCroc. You might be wondering at this point why a robotic creature keeps eating humans and how exactly its digestive system even works. This was another area RoboCroc didn’t expand upon.
Here comes RoboCroc! Guys, RoboCroc is definitely one of those movies that consists of about 85 percent scenes of former celebrities sitting in a dark control room pretending to stare at screens and then maybe 2 percent monster carnage. But that just made every RoboCroc scene even sweeter, you know? Every RoboCroc moment was a treat.
THE MONEY SHOT. RoboCroc jumped out of a lagoon and THROUGH a helicopter! With a lens flare and everything! Truly a glorious moment for RoboCroc herself and also for cinema in general.
Okay, the RoboCroc was just showing off at this point. Like, we get it, RoboCroc. You are getting shinier by the minute, but you’re still a jerk.
Even though the mom from E.T. really wanted RoboCroc to just rampage freely, eventually the military disagreed and started firing guns and missiles at RoboCroc. But as you can see, it took more than military-grade munitions to keep this girl down.
Then RoboCroc escaped into the town sewer, and, for whatever reason, all of the characters took to the sewers as well. Next thing we knew, Parker Lewis and sickly Justin Bieber and the mom from E.T. were all creeping around in a sewer while this enormous, clattering machine snuck up on people, silent as a ninja.
The finale was poorly lit and confusing, but it definitely involved the mom from E.T. getting dragged across the sewer floor by RoboCroc. That’s called karma. But then Parker Lewis threw an EMP bomb directly into RoboCroc’s mouth and destroyed RoboCroc once and for all. Good-bye for now, RoboCroc. May you someday be resurrected as a nanobot-enhanced crocodile GHOST.
Guys, RoboCroc was not very good. I just wanted to be clear on that. It was not great. However, credit where credit’s due: RoboCroc did speak truth to power about the dangers of science, and, frankly, it was about time. Literally thank you, Syfy.
