31 Years, 31 Screams: Lake Dead

Posted by J.D. Dunn on 10.02.2008

Beneath the calmest surface lies the deepest nightmare

Lake Dead (2007)
Director: George Bessudo
Writer: Daniel P. Coughlin
Starring: Alex Quinn, Kelsey Crane, Jim Devoti, Kelsey Wedeen and Tara Gerard..
MPAA: [R]
Runtime: 90m.

We all have black sheep in our families. It could be a drug-addicted brother, a moocher uncle, or a grandfather who thinks the country would be a better place if only "the coloreds" would go back to Africa. Brielle Lake (Crane) thinks she's dealing with the bad limbs on her family tree. Her father is an alcoholic liar, and her sister is an alcoholic mooch who sleeps around and constructs every sentence with a noun, a verb, and the word "fuck." She hasn't even met the worst of the bunch, though. When her grandfather dies and leaves the family hotel to Brielle and her sisters Kelly and Samantha (Wedeen, Gerard), the three of them see an end to their respective financial woes. All they have to do is drive up to the out-of-the-way hotel to assess its value and let the offers come rolling in. Brielle rounds up her fiancé Ben (Devoti) and a few other victims, erm, uh, friends and head up to the hotel for a few days of booze, blunt, and property tax assessment information. Of course, it wouldn't be a horror movie without a bunch of sexy broads and sexual politics. Brielle's sister Kelly brings along her friend Tanya (Malea Richardson) who draws the attention of Bill (Quinn, son of Anthony). Bill is dating Amy (Vanessa Viola), but he has a notorious, wandering eye. Poor Samantha is the first to arrive at the lake, and, thus, the first to die – in a sadistic, brutal fashion, but then we didn't like her much anyway. She got off easy compared to how dialogue gets butchered in the film. Gems like "Let's see if you have the wood to light my fire," and "Family fuck-fest is over!" will leave you cringing. It seems some backwoods inbred hillbillies, the type we see in such fare as Wrong Turn and its imitators, are killing and/or raping the kids who are unlucky enough to come through the hotel. What lifts this slightly above the derivative DTV rip-offs is why they're doing it. It's not hard to see that the two inbred Geico caveman rejects (named Cain and Abel) aren't acting alone. Their co-horts, in fact, are revealed in the opening scene. What follows is something akin to the Hilton Sisters meet Leatherface. The girls get captured by the bad guys, escape, get hauled back in, escape again. It gets fairly tedious, and I assume the filmmakers were hoping that the taboo-breaking premise would carry the film. It doesn't. As I pointed out earlier, the dialogue is just atrocious, with one-liners dropped in at the most inappropriate times, most of them unfunny. Bessudo's direction isn't bad, but there isn't a lot of suspense generated by any of the situations, just mindless violence.

The 411: Lake Dead is easily the worst film of the Horrorfest, mainly because it doesn't aspire to be scary, just sick and depraved. It belongs collecting dust on a Blockbuster shelf next to Snakes on a Train rather than as part of a showcase for unheralded horror films. D+