Million Dollar Crocodile: Trailer Hits for Insane Chinese Creature Feature!

By Robert Beames / June 11, 2012

If Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus taught us anything at all, it's that the world's scariest creatures are made infinitely more entertaining if they're increased in size. How else do you explain our fascination with dinosaurs? They are basically enormous crocodiles, after all. Taking that logic and sprinting with it for a moment might help explain why a Chinese studio has taken the obvious next step of making Million Dollar Crocodile - a lavish CGI creature feature/horror-comedy that stars a gigantic croc which, somewhat ironically, must have cost more than a million dollars to bring to life. For those of you who think a film with a massive reptile in it needs a story, here it is:

Xiao (10) befriends Amao, a 36 foot crocodile, who lives on his fathers croc sanctuary. Soon his father is forced to sell the crocodiles to a gangster who plans to use them for high priced meals. Before Amao is slaughtered, he escapes slaying his captors in the process. In the chaos, Amao accidentally swallows a cellphone with the location of 1 million dollars. When the rumors of this spread, the locals are split in two: some afraid for their lives, others set out to capture and kill the crocodile at any cost.

So it's basically Stop the Pigeon meets The Host, which is presumably how it was pitched to executives. The only problem with the above synopsis is that whoever wrote it forgot to include the phrase "hilarity ensues", which could literally be inserted after every sentence (try it!). It's fantastic that the writers felt "giant killer crocodile stalks village" wasn't enough, and that they felt the need to add "and he has some money". Justin Timberlake once told us that "a million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion dollars!" So in that spirit, here is the theatrical trailer for what What Culture now feels obliged to call Billion Dollar Crocodile, courtesy of Twitch: Looks terrific, eh? Fingers crossed for a UK release, however small and/or straight-to-DVD! In the meantime, enjoy the theatrical posters below. One of which is clearly inspired by Jaws (although the beast seems to be shouting something) and the other being a more bizarre affair, appearing to show a gigantic pole-dancing Barbie Hsu fighting off the marauding horror-foe with her belt amidst a money tornado. Brilliance.