Rana: The Legend of Shadow Lake

If you know Bill Rebane, you'll know what to expect here: Low budget antics with local actors, z-grade effects, and yet an overall charming atmosphere. This is one of his better efforts as it actually has things happening during the plot.

A guy and his gal end up on an isolated island and in between heavy petting, he recounts and incident from his childhood while growing up on the island with his father. When he was but a kid, some folks ended up on the island looking into some sort of legend (and of course the treasure implied by the legend). You've got some treasure hunters masquerading as loggers, and odds with local crazy hunter Charlie (they exchange pot shots at each other fairly regularly), two scientist chicks, and another scientist guy who very early on gets killed by some creature in the lagoon.

Bottom line is: there's a crazy frog monster in the lake in the middle of the island and he's not too happy at being disturbed. The loggers are next on the menu (and the also clash with our narrator's dad several times), but when old Charlie gets plugged our frog guy goes mental and it's up to our survivors to get off the island before Rana gets them all, and who will survive (except the narrator, of course, but then we've got to find out why he came back).

Much more exciting than Rebane's Alpha Incident and The Game, Rana is a more straightforward horror film which pleased me to no end as I'm a sucker for a regional film. The plot moves very fast (for a Rebane film) and there's even a smattering of gore here and there. The acting is what you'd expect if you know Rebane's films, and some of the music was downright funky. Rather high incidents of slow motion throughout, for some reason.

To summarise: If you're curious about Bill Rebane, try this one, Demons of Ludlow and the Giant Spider invasion. Lesser works included the strange film The Game, the boring Alpha Incident, and the so-so comedy Twister's Revenge.

I'm not a Troma fan, in fact I'd go as far as to say that my opinion of the average Troma film is somewhat derogative.

This early Troma title is very different from the others and yet succeeds in somehow being worse. Allegedly a horror comedy I can assure you in contains minimal horror and absolutely no comedy, looking at the cover I know that's probably hard to believe.

Rana: The Legend Of Shadow Lake otherwise known as Croaked : Frog Monster From Hell is not about a giant frog as the cover art would suggest and is more a Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954) type, except despite being made in the 50's the monster looked better then.

With very little actually happening, looking terrible when things do and with little to no redeeming features Rana is actually worse than the cover would suggest and that's really quite impressive.

Nice to know Troma was awful from day one.

The Good:

Funny cover art

The Bad:

Daft concept

Weak horror, poor comedy

Dishonest cover

Oddly boring

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

An actual giant frog would have been considerably more interesting

This makes the Toxic Avenger look intellectual

Okay, so the cover art and poster are complete lies for this film. It's a classic swamp thing type movie. From the art you would think it's a movie about a giant Frog right? No, it's just some green guy walking around making Frog noises. I found it funny the monsters name is supposedly "Rana", which is the name given to the creature by Native American tribes. The word "Rana" is simply the Spanish word for Frog. How very creative (not!). I was disappointed, this was one of the worst, most boring creature features I think I've ever seen. It just dragged its feet for way too long, the acting was horrendous and the monster design could not have been more basic.

This "film" is a Grade Z classic - I have to laugh when I read other comments of these low,low budget horror/monster movies and people are actually ticked off that they weren't "good" - as if these things could be considered well made, well executed horror films. Example, this thing was shot over the course of a COUPLE DAYS in 1975 using local people with a budget that wouldn't cover a sandwich run to the deli. What do you expect??? But for those twisted ones who enjoy, devour and laugh like crazy at badly made cinema, well, this one is amazing! There is truly Ed Wood type dialogue in this flick - awful, unintentionally hilarious dialogue - in fact the THIRD line of the whole film is "We're so isolated on this island" Yes - now THAT'S exposition! The performances are terrible, the guy playing the crazy Ol' hermit gives a 110% and it is a horrible peice of mugging - he's the kind of cliched crazy old timer who actuallys says "heap o' trouble" THREE times in the course of a minute - I kid you not. You never see the "creature" until WAY near the end and the costume is ridiculous. My friends and I laughed a lot at this piece of trash - so if you're looking for a Sam Raimi or even a John Carpenter - no this is not for you - but if you howl at Ed Woods films and seek out campy trash from the 1970s - then look no further.

Rana: The Legend of Shadow Lake (1981)

1/2 (out of 4)

Kelly tells the story of when he was 11-years-old and staying with his father by a large lake. He tells the story of how one summer a half-man, half-frog creature began stalking people.

Bill Rebane directed this film and it's without question one of the worst films of its kind. In fact, I'd argue that this was one of the slowest and weakest films ever made for the genre and the only thing that really saves it is the fact that Troma bought it and gave it a much better title: CROAKED: FROG MONSTER FROM HELL. That title alone is exploitation gold but it also seems that Troma knew that the film itself couldn't be sold so they came up with a crazy title to get some sales.

As far as the film goes, it's really a throwback to the various monster pictures of the 1950's drive-in era. Movies like ATTACK OF THE GIANT LEECHES and THE GIANT GILA MONSTER is what this film tries to be like but the problem here is that the film is deadly dull from the word go. We keep hearing a lot about this monster but we never clearly see him until the very end. And when he does arrive it's easy to see why the filmmakers didn't want to show it off as the creature costume is downright awful. I mean it's really, really bad and certainly one of the worst that you're ever going to see.

The performances really aren't any better and the gore effects are pretty tame and not at all creative. The film clocks in at around 89-minutes, which is honestly about eighty-minutes too long. RANA: THE LEGEND OF SHADOW LAKE just doesn't have a single thing going for it outside of its great title and alternate title. I'm sure they were trying to do something but it just seems like they had no money so instead of anything good we were just given a boring talk-fest.