Fever Lake

You knew what you were getting into when you saw the cover, right? No? Caught it on late-night? I'm sorry to hear that...

We can not blame the actors here. No, this is sloppy, horrific, editing and direction. The director it would seem had a hard time coaxing the best from his actors, who, while not overtly talented, could've been motivated and bumped to do better. Sloppy direction combined with useless editing (some of the worst I've seen), wrecked this movie from attaining B-flick status. Still...

This is good for laughs (see the getting pulled over sequence) no doubt about it. From the goofy Indian (played by a white dude), to that mildly retarded wolf, over to the wretched make-up. The script is dreadful...and that's a good thing if you're looking for fun.

I have, believe it or not, seen worse. Just look at any of Feldman's work circa '95.

I don't know...rent it if you are a Haim or Slater fan, or just into awful productions.

Yes, if you like to see a superficially nicely shot, and rather decently acted, movie that actually concerns...nothing, this would be an adequate choice. This movie was made for video, and in a strictly technical comparison, it doesn't give you, say, the sense of 80s "cheesiness".

It starts out with a man entering his wife's bedroom with an ax, just like in The Shining. Then the man explains to his son that there's a curse. So far so good.

Thereafter we follow a group of high school kids who are going to a Camp Something, just like in Friday the 13th, and everybody persistently states that everything's "creepy". This statement is indicated, for there's nothing happening on the screen getting the viewer to tremble with fear.

Basically, nothing in particular happens until the last 15 min, when most of the high school kids are haphazardly killed. Well, they had to be, otherwise this wouldn't be labeled a horror flick at all.

Okay, forget what I said in my user-comment for AMITYVILLE: DOLLHOUSE (1996). That movie might fail to impress, but it's stuff like FEVER LAKE that perfectly displays everything that's supposedly wrong with the 90's horror decade. Even Corey Haim and Bo Hopkins could not have saved such a dull and boring, unimaginative and uneventful, clichéd and generic movie without tense, scares and atmosphere. It's still better to not impress than to impress in a very bad way, the latter being what FEVER LAKE is good at.

Technically, it might not be the worst movie ever made. Far from, probably. But it's just so not worthy of anybody's time.

We get a prologue-scene (set in 1940), that had me vaguely remembering the opening-scene from MIRROR MIRROR (1990). Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing, as MIRROR MIRROR isn't really a bad movie. But then FEVER LAKE turns into total boredom for more than an hour, with three teen-couples spending some time in a house at a lake. During that, some pointless Indian mysticism is hinted at (some story about an evil spirit in the lake). Only one kill, by a force unseen in the woods (was that supposed to be a wolf possessed by the Evil Spirit?), which involves nothing more than a girl getting some blood smeared in her face. I have no idea why she had to die, really. Absolutely nothing significant happens, not even something remotely exciting.

The only thing that could have saved this movie, was taking the first 5 minutes long prologue sequence and just glue it onto the last 15 minutes (simply throwing that whole hour in between out of the window, as it is forgettable, useless material). Then you'll have a nice little horror-short, that will pleasantly make not the slightest bit of sense, but still is worth a watch because of some mildly entertaining make-up effects near the end. You could call the short-film "Hide and Seek at Mystic Lake". Why this title? Well, the last 15 minutes begin when the teens foolishly decide to go play hide & seek. Some teens get killed. A gross-looking possessed girl (that's my guess, at least) enters the ring. The Indian makes another cameo appearance to warn the frustrated sheriff. Corey Haim provides a misleading (or should I say "incomprehensible") shock ending. And... "The End". All this in 20 minutes that could actually evoke the impression that this strangely confusing short just might have enough interesting elements to base a good, coherent script on that could be turned into a halfway decent full length feature. But now, we have about 90 minutes of nothing, really.

Some people have described FEVER LAKE as some sort of tedious teen-slasher version of THE SHINING (1980). Really, folks, you're giving this movie way too much credit. It's just a snooze-fest at the lake. And if you, by any chance, just can't resist watching something with Indian mumbo-jumbo in it, then why not THE CELLAR (1989)? There, now you have three movies in this comment (minus THE SHINING, of course) that are infinitely more entertaining than FEVER LAKE. And they're not even good movies. This pretty much sums it up, me thinks.

This is one of those terrible movies that is really good for the guys at RiffTrax to skewer. In my opinion there is still a lot of mileage to be gotten out of "teens in the woods encounter evil possessed killer" plots. But this thing is just such a mess! Other people have blamed the actors, the costumer, the director, the scriptwriter. I'll take a new approach and blame the editor. I see an outside possibility that the script was coherent, but that the editor rendered it into an incoherent mess.

The truth is, after watching the riffed version five times, I still don't quite understand what was going on in the movie. The "rules" of fantasy and horror don't need to make real-world sense, but these rules have to be explained clearly, and then stuck to, and make internal sense. The filmmakers failed at all this.

There is a lot to laugh at here. The wolf attack that did not include a wolf, the terrible acting of the "novelist," the assumption that college students play a lot of hide and seek and truth or dare still, the non- Indian, and everyone mispronouncing the word "wolf."

Poor Corey Haim. Being molested as a kid actor by producers, his drug addiction, and this movie. There must be a special place in the afterlife for someone who suffered that much.

I am not a movie snob - I am always on the lookout for low budget indie gems that are well made for their budget and talent pool.

This is not one of them.

I watched this because I like Corey Haim. I wanted to like this movie because he was in it. But I can't. I just can't. This movie is so bad, I don't think putting all my favorite actors in it would have made a difference.

Corey Haim, Mario Lopez, and Lauren Parker were the only ones who seemed to know how to act. Everyone else seemed wooden and out of place. When a dangerous moment was supposed to be happening, everyone ran like they were out on a leisurely Sunday jog. The pacing of the story can be described the same way, which made me keep checking the time to see how much I had left.

There is literally nothing redeemable about this movie. Nothing in the script is written very well. Not the characters, not the plot, absolutely nothing. The only back story that exists is with one of the main characters, and it's the one you can tell from the beginning who the perp is going to end up being. They give it all away from the start. There is no real mystery or reason for the audience to engage with the story at all.

It's a completely pointless slasher flick. But wait! Aren't there a lot of pointless slasher flicks that are still entertaining? Sure there are - and compared to this movie, they are Oscar winners.

I don't have a problem with movies that employ a lot of ambiance. This is one example where manufacturing ambiance doesn't do any justice whatsoever. There is zero skill in camera angles. Even the music is awful. The costumes would make K-Mart designers go on prozac. It's like they went to a church bazaar, bought a mystery box and dressed themselves blindfolded. I know it's 1996, but even by 1996 standards they were dressed pretty horribly.

There's a lot of reviewers that believe this movie must have been made in the early 1980s, THAT IS HOW BAD THEY ARE DRESSED.

This movie is a total waste. It's a waste of time, a waste of celluloid, a waste of bandwidth, and it's even a waste to have a profile dedicated to this movie on IMDb. It's a waste of an hour and a half of your life.

RIP Corey Haim - even you couldn't save this piece of crap movie.