While Tobe Hooper's Crocodile (2000) was very much a poor relation his Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), in both a bunch of teens in the middle of nowhere encounter a deadly local threat, the sequel is more akin to the likes of Anaconda (1997), with a mature cast and the added presence of a human threat.
This time instead of partying youths, the protagonists are bank robbers and hostages. During a storm the desperate criminals hijack their flight to Acapulco and it crashes as a result. Exploiting weaknesses in airport security, pre-9/11, the thieves had been able to smuggle aboard weapons with laughable ease.
Stranded in a Mexican swamp, the thieves hold fellow survivors captive as they attempt to make their journey to safety with their loot. Unfortunately they have landed in the feeding ground of a ridiculously large crocodile. As they are eaten one by one, a plucky young heroine attempts to overcome the human and reptile threat to be united with her boyfriend.
A parallel plot in which the boyfriend becomes aware of his girlfriend's danger and sets out to find her fills out the running time and seems copied from I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998). There's nothing original in this movie and even the shocking denouement is a steal from Carrie (1976).
Stage scenes evoke the kind of creature features shot in the 1950s and Martin Kove lends quality support to a cast of unknowns doing a Harrison Ford impersonation with shades of Robert Shaw. Intertextual elements such as these mean that there is never a dull moment for genre fans.
While the settings for the film are the United States and Acapulco, it is quite clear from the closing credits that this film was made far beyond the fringes of Hollywood. Prolific production company Nu Image, who churned out a number of creature features in the early 00s, have made many of their films in South Africa and Bulgaria, but this was shot in India.
How much you enjoy Crocodile 2 will largely depend on your expectations and mood. I loved this when I first saw it and found it very bland the next. There's a modest amount of gore to please post-pub viewers of all ages but there's little that's memorable.
