Ghost Lake (2004)

Just what I expected

Just perfect...

Fresh and Exciting

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Alright, I'll be honest about it, It scared the hell out of me, Why? Because of crap like this, Hollywood is getting a bad name. How in gods name can one make something like this for an actual Hollywood release???The school movies we used to make with a simple video-camera were even better. The story is stupid, it's the return of the undead-movie number billion, but with shitty completion. The actors, hahahahahaha...I'm sorry, thats mean, I mean the amateurs that had roles in this movie obviously haven't been in or considered acting school before accepting parts. You know at one point I thought I saw the price label still hanging on one of the zombie masks, it looked like it was 12 dollars.With a little editing, it could go for a comedy. In a way it is horror, I mean, it's shocking to see what kind of junk makes it to Hollywood. Avoid at all costs, unless you're really really really drunk.

Rebecca Haster (Taturn Adair) blames herself for the death of her parents and decides to spend sometime alone in the lakeside cottage of her parents in Rushford Lake. She meets Stan James (Timothy Prindle) on the road and gives a lift to the stranger. Later they become friends, while Rebecca sees supernatural events with drowned people in the lake. While searching the accidents in the library, she finds that mysterious deaths happen in the spot every thirteen years.I bought this DVD without any previous reference and only based on its creepy cover, since I love zombie movies. Unfortunately, this film is simply awful, with a messy and flawed screenplay. I have no problems with low budget movies with simple special effects, but with good story, direction and performances and this is not the case of "Ghost Lake". Further, I am not moralist but the lead character Rebecca has the behavior of a slut, having casual sex with two strangers in a couple of days and while grieving the death of her parents. My vote is two.Title (Brazil): "O Retorno dos Mortos" ("The Return of the Dead")

As some have mentioned, this is, well, not a good movie. The only good part are the scenes at the beginning and at the end in which our hot lead actress Tatum brings out the twins - and nice twins they are. I would NOT, however, care to see them again if that means watching the whole damn movie - it was THAT bad.Fine, so it's low-budget. And yes, i've seen Eclipse and I've seen Back From Hell, and I enjoyed them! I've even ANALYZED Black Woods. These films are all fine examples of cult-like films that have done the most out of their budgets. I'll give you another example of low-budget horror: "Blair Witch" ring a bell? True, it didn't need as much special effects as this move would need, but every single actor in that film was better than every single actor in Ghost Lake - and for one hell of a lot less money. For Nick, who wrote that the acting was more done "like in real life" instead of exaggerating - please watch the movie one more time. I could never in my life have talked anything like any of those actors. They talked like they were reading from the script during the whole film, from start to finish. In fact, I found myself thinking several times, "what the hell? Didn't they get time to memorize their lines properly??". This movie is one I would not want to watch again unless my life depended on it. Let's say we forget about the acting that makes Coolio look like Oscar material for a minute. Let's say that we didn't notice the make-up that is supposed to make the actors look like zombies but instead makes them look like they dropped buckets of various paint over their heads, or when water came out the "zombies'" mouths like when you put water in your mouth and talk - you know, like when you were in kindergarten. Let's say that just for a minute, the story wasn't utter rubbish, and didn't contain almost exclusively script flaws and logical errors. Let's then say that we would be able to overlook ALL of this at ONCE, in an attempt to find other good things about this movie. The what would we have?We would still have a bad movie.The first thing that struck me was that this was actually a comedy! My thoughts wandered off to "Scary Movie" or "Dawn of the Dead" - in other words either an intentional parody or, well, another kind of intentional parody. I was sad to see that I was mistaken. Never mind the laughable scene in which our boobalicious Tatum is PUSHED out to the party by her parents; never mind the scenes where it switches between her driving, her letting the nice, big twins out for some air and some lickin' - it's the plot. First of all: For a horror movie, something happening every 13 years is way too often. A curse is not something happening twice every generation. I can not for the life of me figure out how anyone in their right mind will even CONSIDER the plot or the storyline in any way anything but awful. Secondly, I can say the same thing about the directing - yes, he does film very well at night, fine. But he's using amateurish cutting and ways of quickening the pace. It seems to me that he's rushing the production to make the suffering shorter.. I don't think even Jay Woelfel really knew what the explanatory mathematics at the end meant, and our poor Tatum and her twins looked just like a teenager pretending to understand when being presented with the Theory of Relativity - "Ah, so THAT'S what's happening! Of course! I KNEW that E wasn't good for you, but i never knew why!"And thirdly, and this is the worst part of the whole movie: The beginning. And i'm not even talking about the laughable way Woelfel is cutting the memories into her driving, or the humorous "Days of our Lives"-wannabe expressions on Tatums face when she tries to act on the cuts, either. No, i'm talking about the way her parents dies.This is a major spoiler for you who haven't seen the movie yet, but it's a fun one, and the reason why I thought this movie was a comedy at first: Her dad wakes up in the master bedroom, coughing - he smells the gas and yells something like "honey! *cough, cough* I think there might be a gas leak! *cough *cough' Honey?!", with no response. So he crawls (yes, CRAWLS) out of bed, and KEEPS crawling, actually, across the floor and to the stairs - from which he falls down and dies. And how does her mother die? From the gas as well - as she is sitting right next to the stove. Now hold on, I'll say that one more time: Her MOTHER dies next to the stove without noticing the gas leak, but her FATHER not only notices the gas, but he notices the gas IN HIS SLEEP and WAKES UP! Not only is it highly unlikely that the father would even be much affected in the second story of such a big house - he would CERTAINLY not wake up from the smell! There are so many logical flaws at the beginning of the film that I could not see how this could be anything but a parody. I even told my girlfriend as we started watching, "oh, cool, it's a parody! I thought it was a horror flick!" - and sadly, I was mistaken. I rank this among the two worst movies I've seen along with "Dracula 3000".However, I still just can't bare to give this a one. After all, Tatum ARE letting her twins out. Twice. That, to me, doubles the value of this film.

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.