Ghost Lake

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

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.

Cinematography - 8 - very good for a low budget production. Special Effects - 9 - excellent for a low budget production. Acting - 0 - 6 -with 6 for the lead actress; supporting roles include some actors that are embarrassingly bad. Even with the few lines they had, the couple that survived a plunge in the lake were so bad I cringed every time they opened their mouth, especially the man. The doctor's voice was so loud, it was more startling than any of the zombie scenes. Audio - 3 - a number of indoor scenes had a distracting hollow/reverb sound. Plot - 4 - would be higher if not so confusingly told. Dialog - 1 - at many points it is totally amateurish and would have been as well written if it had been outsourced to a 5th grade class.

The saving grace for me was the lead actress, Tatum Adair. I found her somewhat compelling and she kept me watching the whole movie instead of bailing out. Sad that the weak points of this movie could have been easily fixed, because otherwise much of the production was very good.

This is just another STV "horror" movie that plagues video stores everywhere. There is nothing I want more than a resurgence of good horror movies, but films like "Ghost Lake" do everything possible to ensure this never happens. The movie is garbage from start to finish; horribly written, shot, acted and edited. Even the minimal zombie make-up can't save it. I wasted $6.50 at Blockbuster with this one, and I've done the same thing countless times before out of desperation and a faint hope than someday, somewhere, someone will make a horror movie we've all been waiting for. As a horror filmmaker myself, I say give me the budget for Ghost Lake and I'll show you how it's done.

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.