Wicked Lake (2008)

DECEMBER 25, 2008

GENRE: COMEDIC, CRAP, RAPE-REVENGE, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: DVD (STORE RENTAL)

I am a man, and a very enthusiastic fan of horror movies. More importantly, I love junky movies that you’re not supposed to take too seriously, if at all. So the idea of a tongue-in-cheek movie about four hot girls making out with each other and then killing some rednecks with their supernatural powers should be a shoe-in for, at the very least, “so bad its good” entertainment, right? Then why, oh why, is Wicked Lake so goddamn boring in just about every conceivable aspect of its existence?

I mean really, if Robin Sydney and another, even hotter girl making out for nearly five minutes near the film’s beginning can’t even interest me, then director Zach Passero has already failed miserably. And that’s 10 minutes into the film! This could have been a decent short film with maybe 2-3 people. Take the standard survival horror setup, with one or two rednecks attacking our “heroine”, only have it turn out that she’s a witch or werewolf or vampire or whatever and kill them. Bam! Done. But nope, they have to make a whole movie about this. And you would think with 95 minutes at their disposal, there would be more than enough time to at least explain what the girls are, right? Not a chance! They are sort of witch-y, they display vampire powers, but they are only activated by a full moon. They’re everything and nothing all at once.

And again, none of this is supposed to be taken seriously (yes, Passero and writers Chris Sivertson and Adam Rockoff have decided to use attempted rape as a catalyst for their attempts at humor), so I could care less about the bad acting and nonsensically thin story. It’s the sheer DULLNESS of this movie that kills it. The lesbian stuff is dull. The kills are dull. The gore is dull. The bad redneck actors are so bad that their attempts to be over the top are dull. And needless to say, the scenes with two cops investigating, abruptly shoehorned into the film’s 2nd half without any sort of introduction whatsoever, are even MORE dull, because by design they are there to presumably give the audience a breather from the high hilarity and awesomeness that the lesbo/redneck/gore scenes were allegedly providing.

One of the cops is Tim Thomerson, who thanks to HMAD I am actually seeing more of than I have in the past 10 years (since his Full Moon Dollman/Trancers heyday). He fares no better than anyone else in this POS, but at least with him I have some sympathy for appearing in such drivel. Like me, I’m sure he was enticed by the over-the-top plot, only to discover that no one involved seemingly knew how to actually be funny or interesting.

Most annoying is Marc Senter, playing a wispy emo kid who makes his character from The Lost look bearable by comparison. It’s essentially a character Andy Samberg might play for 20 seconds in one of those “gotta fill some time” SNL sketches, only he’s around for the entire movie. To be fair, the one laugh I got out of the entire thing was when his character was impaled on a door 35 minutes in, only to survive for the rest of the movie. So people open and shut the door with his body still hanging there; it’s a funny sight gag. But still, I would have been MORE appreciative if I didn’t have to endure his “funny” character at all anymore, and I really hope for Senter's sake that he gets a role as someone likable someday.

The DVD comes with a poorly recorded commentary track that is, unsurprisingly, “fun”! Everyone is in a living room, talking over each other and talking about how fun the movie is. I think it’s safe to say that if you didn’t like the movie, you won’t like the track. There are also a collection of outtakes and deleted scenes, but considering the quality of the film itself, I couldn’t bring myself to suffer through them.

This movie was so bad I had to re-edit my “worst of 2008” list for Bloody Disgusting. Since it was already encoded and formatted and ready to post, it would have been a pain in the ass to put it at number 2 (April Fool’s Day is still the worst) and move everything else down, so instead I took out my old number 9 (Trapped Ashes, which was also bad but so obscure I felt it wasn’t worth noting) and put this in instead. My apologies to the makers of films 2-8, all of whom actually managed to make terrible films that were slightly better than this steaming pile.

What say you?