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Crocodile (2000)
Horrific, for all the wrong reasons.
Let me start by saying I have a soft spot for modern B-movie creature-features. They're usually formulaic, but both the creators and the audience are in on the gag, it's played appropriately, and the odd genuine surprise is made sweeter.
Crocodile though takes every element of the formula and strips it of what makes it fun. The script, direction and acting are lacklustre, the effects are sufficiently bad to be plain bad, not funny, any intentional humour was presumably left on the cutting room floor, and any hope that you might care about the fate of even one of the characters is dispelled in the first fifteen minutes.
It was made incredibly cheaply, and despite that has perfectly OK cinematography and lighting (excluding the FX), so it scored some points from me. Unfortunately everything else got a minus number, putting in firmly in the "never again" category.
Scorpion (2014)
A Frankenstein's Monster that manages to be less than the sum of its parts
I want to like Scorpion. It's a fun idea, not exactly original but most of the shows it steals from ("Lie to me", "Numbers", "The A- Team", ...) are dead so where's the harm? The problem is that it turns out (in the best cinematic tradition) that when stitching this body together from bits of the various deceased, they managed to give it a damaged brain.
The actors are fine. Watching the series it becomes obvious that the flatness and disconnection that plagues the characters in early episodes is just bad writing. Yes, the idea is to show an arc of emotional development and that requires the start point to be - well, underdeveloped, but the writers' answer to this was to give Walter and Happy in particular the appearance of being little more than shop-window dummies (as opposed to Sylvester, who is the reincarnation of the Cowardly Lion from Wizard of Oz). As the series unfolds, all of the main players show themselves capable of real nuance and pretty good comic timing, but for the most part they're trapped within scripts that do their best to dull the edge that the actors can bring.
The plots, oh my, the plots... Look, we don't need every detail to be perfect, every MacGuffin checked for plausibility by a Nobel laureate, but some occasional concession to reality would be nice. Pretty much every week the peril that our heroes face is thoroughly ridiculous, yet somehow nowhere near as unbelievable as the solutions they come up with to defeat it. Defenders of the show tend to talk at this point about "suspension of disbelief" and how we cut superhero or sci-fi shows more slack, but frankly Scorpion sets itself up for a fall by pretending to have its roots in reality. It opens every episode with an "Inspired by the life of Walter O'Brien" card, but the actual stories seem to owe more to Walter Mitty. If you took the box set of Season 1 and played a drinking game where you downed a shot for every factually correct or even plausible plot event, you'd wake up the next morning without a hangover.
Thing is, there's a decent show in there struggling to get out. The basic concept (independent intellects who work for the Government on specialised problems) is well-enough proved. There are characters who one can engage with and are developing, albeit slowly. I've even bumped my rating up from 1 to 3 in acknowledgement of its improvements. If there was any actual intelligence applied to the writing, Scorpion could be great, but at the time of writing, it really isn't.