A local sheriff (Brendan Gleeson) pulls a diver out of Black Lake (they wanted to call it Lake Placid, but that name was already taken), only to find that he's been bitten in half. What they find is a tooth, and this gets sent to a museum for analysis.
The tooth ends up in the hands of Kelly Scott (Bridget Fonda), who doesn't usually do field research, and most certainly not in Maine. But because her boss - and boyfriend - has decided to do a little extra-curricular activity of his own with her friend, she ends up in the backwoods. This may or may not be a good choice.
When she gets there, she is greeted by the sheriff and equally sarcastic (but good looking) fish and game agent Jack Wells (Bill Pullman). Jack and the sheriff are headed out to investigate things on the lake, and he doesn't want to take a woman along at all, much less a city girl who isn't interested in camping out, but she manages to wrangle herself a ticket to the show.
Once there, they meet up with crocodile hunter Hector Cyr (Oliver Platt). Hector is eccentric, which is a nice way of saying that he's a mental case. If he had a bit less money, they would simply lock him up and throw away the key. But since he is rich, and brought along a bunch of expensive equipment, they let him stay, as long as he agrees to stay out of the way. Naturally, he doesn't.
No one wants to believe that they have a crocodile here in rural Maine, but before long, they've found the beast, who looks to be about 30 feet long, and that's in the water.
As they argue about what it is or is not, they see the beast crawl out, grab a massive bear, eat it, and crawl back in. Then everyone believes that they do indeed have a crocodile on their hands.
Searching the water for him, they can't seem to find him, but they do find a cow (or two) on the bottom, and that leads them back to the lakeside farm of Mrs. Delores Bickerman (Betty White).
Mrs. Bickerman previously said that she hadn't seen anything odd, but once pressured, she admits not only that she had been feeding the crocodile, but that her husband, who had gone missing, managed to get in between the crocodile and one of the horses that he wanted to eat. She seems to have been feeding him for about six years!
The sheriff and Jack want to take him out, but Kelly and Hector manage to convince them to try and capture him first, so that's just what they try and do. Dangling one of Mrs. Bickerman's cows from Hector's helicopters, they lure him into shore, and shoot the crocodile with tranquilizers, which don't seem to do much at all. Fortunately, he comes after them and gets tangled in the helicopter itself. It's not exactly a cage, but it does the trick long enough to get him doped up some more.
Unfortunately, there's another crocodile, which the sheriff manages to take care of with his big gun.
What Mrs. Bickerman doesn't mention is that there are several more babies that she's been feeding. So there may be a sequel one day (there is, in fact, a Lake Placid 2 that aired on the SciFi Channel in 2007).
Rated R for violent creature attacks and related gore, and for language.
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