“Blood is thicker than water, and ours is thicker than most…” notes a demented Granma at one point in After Dark’s LAKE DEAD, this year’s thirtieth (is anyone counting?) variation on the HILLS HAVE EYES / WRONG TURN / TEXAS CHAINSAW theme. Like the recent, equally forgettable TIMBER FALLS, this has its own bland-ish variant on the interbred families seen in those earlier outings, though at least LAKE DEAD has a handful of suitably warped details (like an enthusiastic smooch between elderly mother and son) and some fashionably sadistic graphic gore to enliven the derivative proceedings.
It’s also not short on eye candy. Kelsey Crane, for instance, is a sexy presence as our blonde heroine, who gets a call from her no-good dad to inform that her (previously unknown) grandfather has died. Crane stands to inherit Grandad’s lakeside motel “up north” and, despite her dad’s dire warnings of the deceased old dude being a bad, bad man, she plans a weekend break at the property with a bunch of friends and her two sisters. One of them, a foul-mouthed but hot coke whore (Tara Gerard), survives just long enough to show off her marvelous arse before a spike is hammered through her feet and she’s dumped in the lake. Turns out the area is home to a pair of shaggy-haired axe wielding in-bred loons and their overly close-knit family.
Though it gets dumber and duller as it goes along before fizzling out completely with a lame retro coda, LAKE DEAD does win points for nostalgically reviving the old-school slasher format without any intrusive irony for the post-SCREAM smart-aleck set. A modest round of applause, then, for a movie that delivers a bevy of fit gals in cut off-shorts smoking dope around a Crystal Lake-ish backdrop, getting killed after illicit sex in the woods and, where contracts permit, getting naked for our viewing pleasure (super-hot Malea Richardson, playing the always-welcome slasher movie slut, provides the boobs). All this plus a bravura pick-ax-to-the-face reveal shot and a fairly jolting shotgun-assisted cranial pummeling.
“This is so bad! This is so awful!” bemoans one character at an overwrought stage in the script. LAKE DEAD isn’t that bad at all – the gore is well staged, there are stylistic flourishes and at one point someone deadpans “That’s how you fuck a man” after shooting a guy in the head. Still, a brief RV-invasion sequence emphasizes just how much is stolen wholesale from both versions of THE HILLS HAVE EYES (among others) and chances are you’d have forgotten the whole shebang even existed by the time this year’s bunch of After Dark movies is unleashed in theatres.
-Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
