Ghost Lake

There are very few horror films in which I can find no redeeming quality - and "Ghost Lake" has the dubious honour of being one of them. Although it doesn't feature the same level of technical ineptitude as, say, "666: The Demon Child", its unspeakably annoying "actors", awful dialogue (which, I'm sorry to say, is perfectly audible at all times), and pitiful visual effects all add up to a thoroughly reprehensible waste of an hour and three quarters.

Add to all that the fact that the plot was gaffed entirely from a Matthew Costello novel entitled "Beneath Still Waters" (which, as luck would have it, is being adapted by the lovely Brian Yuzna) and you have a film that you simply can't like for any reason at all. Really.

Well, that's not completely true. In the picture's defence, the scenes involving forcible expulsion of water from the mouths of various people are awfully amusing... for entirely the wrong reasons, of course. Please avoid this dreadful thing.

Rebecca Haster (Taturn Adair) blames herself for the death of her parents and decides to spend sometime alone in the lakeside cottage of her parents in Rushford Lake. She meets Stan James (Timothy Prindle) on the road and gives a lift to the stranger. Later they become friends, while Rebecca sees supernatural events with drowned people in the lake. While searching the accidents in the library, she finds that mysterious deaths happen in the spot every thirteen years.

I bought this DVD without any previous reference and only based on its creepy cover, since I love zombie movies. Unfortunately, this film is simply awful, with a messy and flawed screenplay. I have no problems with low budget movies with simple special effects, but with good story, direction and performances and this is not the case of "Ghost Lake". Further, I am not moralist but the lead character Rebecca has the behavior of a slut, having casual sex with two strangers in a couple of days and while grieving the death of her parents. My vote is two.

Title (Brazil): "O Retorno dos Mortos" ("The Return of the Dead")

Rebecca leaves for a night of drinking wanting to be home by ten but her mom essentially says, and I might be paraphrasing here "no hon go whore around, we don't want to see you back till late". Of course she gets the message and sleeps with the first guy who gives he a kind of semi-compliment. As she'staking it all like the slut she is, her parents die of a horrible acting um.. I mean a gas leak. She goes to the cabin by the lake to get rid of her guilt, not before picking up a hitchhiker that she'll later screw (her parents would be proud) A mixture of bad and TERRIBLE acting, as well as some crappy split screen. What had the chance to be a perfectly good mediocre movie crashes and burns.

My Grade: D-

Eye Candy: Tatum Adair gets topless

I just saw the movie and I thought it to be an awful replica of return of the dead. Only this time people are drowning and spitting water.hahahaha kinda funny. It was somehow comedic and made no sense what so ever. I did however enjoyed the sound effect that was the only scary thing in the film. The actors where just as bad as the movie. Too much overacting and it had a trashy 80's look to it. The producer should have just made it a sex movie where zombies could get it off with the living. That would have been much more fun than that movie. If you choose to see it anyway, I would not recommend you to buy the film.

For those of you who saw the movie and understood the concept of the 13th hour on the 13th day please let me know. The melted chuckie dolls has me puzzled as well.

Maybe a bit naive to think but I thought that amateur movies like this weren't made anymore in this era- and most certainly didn't received a global release.

The movie really surprised me how incredible amateur looking this movie was. Not only with its acting and visual style but also with its technical aspect, such as the editing, camera-positioning. Especially the editing is extremely lacking at times. It makes some sequences come across as disjointed and confusing. Also the weak camera-positioning most certainly doesn't help all of the sequences. At times the movie really looks and feels as if it was being made by a couple of high school students who decided to pick up a camera and start shooting an horror movie.

The movie just isn't ever tense, scary or mysterious, were also lies a big problem of the movie obviously. For a genre movie it just does basically everything wrong to reach a good enough and effective end result.

The musical score is also quite horrendous. It's a very simple typical kind of movie score, that is too prominently present at times when nothing is happening in the movie and not present at all- or not good enough at the tense or scary moments of the movie. The music has some huge misses in the movie, it could had truly enhanced some of the scare moments and tension of the movie at times.

Of course the story also doesn't help much. The movie doesn't have the most incredible pace and story-flow. The movie also tries to be more clever than it really is, by putting in many plot twists and making things seem different than they truly are. Without doubt they also did this to make the movie original. The result however isn't much good, since it makes the movie unnecessarily difficult to follow, especially toward the end, when twists and false twists follow each other rapidly. Through the many twists the movie also starts to make less and less sense. The movie is filled with some gaping holes and the more you actually start thinking about the story, the less sense it starts to make. Not only are there many improbabilities but also many things that just plain good old fashioned plot holes, mistakes and other things that don't make much sense.

Judging by looking at this movie Mr. Woelfel (is that even a real name?) watched a bit too many Japanese horror and John Carpenter movies. In its style it mostly tries to impersonate Japanses movies and in its story, storytelling and characters it mostly tries to impersonate John Carpenter horror movies. Nothing wrong with impersonate different styles and applying them to your own style film-making but the style just doesn't work out, mainly due to its poor budget, weak editing and story-flow. It's perhaps even a bit sad to see at times how hard they tried, without a good result.

I had no idea who Jay Woelfel was before this but looking at his filmography he seems like a regular B-horror movie maker, who just isn't the most talented or visionary person around, no matter how hard he ever tries. He is one of those typical persons who thinks he can write, direct, produce, edit and compose all of his own movies. And does he think he is Brian De Palma, with using all those redundant and completely pointless split-screen shots that don't add anything at all? Yep, I think I'm going to watch more Woelfel movies alright.

Yes, it's true that the movie is so bad at times that it becomes good. It's unintentionally funny at times, due to how clumsy it is made and how bad the acting and dialog are. Who ever told those persons in this movie that they could act in movies? Granted that the script with its many weak and often pointless dialog also doesn't help them much but honestly, it's obvious as well that the actors just don't have the talent for the job.

On a positive note, the make-up effects are quite good looking. Same goes for the simplistic but effective special-effects.

With the same story material but more money and real professionals involved this movie possibly could had been a perfectly good genre movie to watch. But not now.

2/10

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