O Perigo Vem do Lago

kind of the opposite of the other movie I watched today, I liked this one a lot less than I expected. Its gotten mixed reviews mostly on the good side Id say. Unfortunately it does not deserve the praise. What I did respect about the movie was the way the creature looked. It looked like they mostly used practical effects mixed with a little bit of cgi. This in my opinion was a great move on part of the directors. Using practical effects is almost a must for me. There has been a flood of cgi filled creature features and most of the time as soon as the crappy digitally animated creature shows up it pulls me right out of the movie. The creature in this movie looked great, Unfortunately the movie has nothing else going for it, The whole movie takes place around a group of teenagers stranded on a small boat. They make incredibly bad and unbelievable decisions that just make you mad and just over half way through I couldn't wait for this movie to end. It would have been nice to see them do something special with this cool creature and when it finds its first victim I thought things were looking up but they definitely went down from there.

There was not a single person I cared about dying in this flick.

Bad, not in a good way.

If you're going to make a low budget shark/croc/piranha knock off you need talent. No talent? You need good actors. No talent and no good actors available? You need really inventive kills. None of the above = weekend hobby film making. Dumb, illogical, boring boring boring. And, why did they always paddle towards the furthest shore???

Gathering together for one last trip following high school graduation, a group of friends' trip to a small nearby lake forces them to come face-to-face with the lake's monstrous fish creature living there and try to find a way to get out alive.

This one here had just a never-ending series of problems against it that there's not a whole lot of good points for it. The biggest issue with the film is that the film thinks these kinds of callous, vile humans are worthy of being the center-stage for the actions in here, yet none of them are ever worthy of doing anything more than being cannon fodder for the creature as other, smarter characters fought it off. Relying on bullying, cheating, blackmail and deciding that others where more worthy of living and dumping their friends overboard to die with the creature in the lake with them is perhaps the biggest death-knell to each of these characters, especially since all the while there's more than enough tactics on hand to actually fight it off with a gallant effort without resorting to dumping your friends in with the creature that even thinking of resorting to that tactic is really hard to forgive. Of course, the fact that there's one who knows the truth about it but decides against telling the others so that he can win the heart of the group's resident slut doesn't do much to favor this either, and the fact that this one tends to focus solely on the group sitting in the canoe arguing with each other tends to make for wholly uneventful programming with nothing interesting happening. That said, the gore isn't half-bad for the mangled bodies really look like they've been munched on and the creature does have some realistic looks to it since it's kept to a more reasonable size without being too gigantic to live there undetected, and frankly some of the sequences in the later half with the rapidly- drowning boat do get somewhat suspenseful. Overall, though, there's not too much to like here.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language and Graphic Violence.

This filmmaker needs to get someone with writing talent to write the scripts for his films. The biggest weakness of this movie is the pathetic script itself. You can forgive the low budget special effects, because it is in fact a low budget film. But the poorly written script makes it impossible to even care about the characters. I found myself disliking every character. There wasn't a single character in the movie that I felt was worth saving, so when death approached, I was thinking, oh please, just get it over with. These teens, who are supposed to be good friends, barely react when the first one of them dies. And it never gets past that. Their lack of real terror or emotion means that the audience lacks terror and emotion. It's not cheesy enough to be a cult favorite where it's so bad it's good. This movie just leaves you shaking your head. I didn't give it a 1, because I gave credit for some decent cinematography.