Le Lac des Fantômes

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

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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Once in a while, you watch a movie where you can just immediately tell that the directors mother is also his aunt. One such movie is Ghost Lake. As a no-/low-budget filmmaker, I generally sympathize with others in this end of the field. One has to cope with annoying editors and actors who, in various strange ways, convince you that they can actually act and sign on to the point where it's too late to replace them. But much of this can be forgiven if the general intention with the movie is good or just honest. Not so the case with Ghost Lake. It repeatedly rips off one horror movie after the other, all the while setting new lows in acting, shooting and musicianship (yup, the score was awful to boot).

That being said, I did laugh my ass off watching it. Watching this movie was the equivalent of reading a list of cinematic don't's. And I don't mean "don't" as in "Don't use voiceovers" and similar snooty filmschool bs. I mean "don't" as in, "Don't do this, because it looks like you can't tell your ass from your elbow, anyway you slice it". If you're in any way into films (just being an avid moviegeek will do) this movie will provide literally dozens of laughs-per-minute with it's machine-gun like barrage of ineptitude. You're going to want to show this to your friends just to see their bewildered expression that simply says "Wtf were they thinking?!" like nothing else.

If your idea of awesome cinematic experiences is films like Death Tunnel or Kaw, well this movie is too shoddy for even that. No person living could possibly like this dreck, and the mere possibility is downright offensive.

I'm one of those who really get easily scared by movies, and especially horror movies, of course. I'm so easy scared that it's almost embarrassing. It doesn't even really have to happen anything; if the mood is at least done almost right, I can sit in intense suspense and wait for something to happen.

So the strange thing about this movie is: I did not get scared. I mean - I probably jumped a bit in the seat one or two times, and I think I felt a bit, and only a bit, of suspense maybe three or four minutes together, during the whole movie.

That must mean that they hardly did anything right, right? And that's right - they hardly did anything right: Most of the supposed-to-be-scare-stuff happened in broad daylight. I mean, how scary is broad daylight? And the mentioned stuff was for a big part filmed from far away, and how scary is stuff that is filmed from far away? Another thing: what did they do with the screen all the time?!? That division-stuff - disturbing!!! And I still wonder how the lead-lady figured out the secret of "now is the 13th year, so they are going to kill 13 people", for instance. Much of the plotting was completely not understandable.

Okay, one cool thing to end with: the start really freaked me out - with the place-to-place- and time-jumping.

Oh, did I mentioned that much of the acting (though not all) was completely laughable? The bad-guy-laughter from the three Zombies by the lake near the end was probably the most artificial (both concerning acting and directing) I've ever seen - and I've seen my share of oldies.

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.