Blood Lake

Year of Release: 1987
Genre: Horror
IMDB Rating: 3.7 / 10
Level of Awful: High

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

In my experience the horror genre is a very forgiving one. If you appear in one bad movie it doesn’t mean that you can’t have a prolific career starring in countless other terrible movies. Some people have made a life out of becoming kings and queens of b-grade horror films, so you know something went horribly wrong when not one person in Blood Lake went on to appear in anything else (except one, who had a minor role playing a card dealer). This is perhaps not surprising when one considers that, halfway through making the movie, it would appear that the director, crew, writers and actors all had a stroke and forgot what it was that they were trying to do and what direction they were trying to steer the movie in. The result is 80 minutes or so of absolute confusion, virtually no action and dialogue so incomprehensible that you have no way of following what’s going on.

One look at these shorts and you'll never feel a sexual impulse again!

OK, so our story begins with 6 teenagers going off to a little lake-side house for a holiday. It’s going to be a fun-filled weekend of beer drinking, weed smoking, skiing, boat riding and casual sexing. We’re never told where these kids come from or how old they are so it’s very difficult to judge why exactly they need the weekend away (not that there ever really needs to be an excuse to take a vacation, but it is a horror movie so the need to get away usually fuels some form of back story). Two of the kids are literally children with the boy constantly trying to get into the younger girl’s pants while the other 4 seem to have made some form of arrangement as to who will be sleeping with who prior to arriving at the house. The first 50 minutes of Blood Lake is taken up solidly by scenes of the kids unloading the boat, drinking beer and skiing on the lake. Your patience for sitting through these scenes will not be rewarded because they have absolutely nothing to do with the “horror” that, in the loosest sense, takes up the remaining half hour.

This scene is as riveting as it looks in this photo.

Eventually the people making the movie stopped having their joint stroke and decided that something would have to be done to justify calling the movie Blood Lake and inflicting the horror genre with yet another b-grade nightmare. To do this all that was needed was a middle-aged man with a knife creeping around the house in broad daylight. When two new kids are thrown into the mixture to help pad out the blandness of it all they see the man and attempt to call him out. Thankfully for our killer none of these kids seems to be very athletic and he manages to make a very beige escape by darting off at a gradual pace. Of course no killer in a horror movie worth his salt attacks his victims during the day, so when night descends the closest thing to exciting stuff we’re gonna find in this movie begins. Armed with his knife and night vision goggles he begins stalking the kids with all the agility and skill of an angry hippo, ready to take his revenge on one of the kid’s fathers for a misdeed committed many years ago.

And then the ending happens. You’re not quite sure what is being implied by it or what the hell happened after the killings ended, but it does add to the final conclusion that just because you have a video camera and think you can make a horror film it doesn’t always mean that you should.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• The word ‘man’ should be thrown into a sentence after every 3 words.
• There are only 2 types of women in the world: those that do and those that will.
• Water skiing is easier when you’re in the water.
• Before the invention of video games a quarter could provide hours of entertainment.
• The moon can remain completely full for days at a time.
• Lakes are like wormholes: you can swim right across one and land up 20 feet from where you started.
• The police want you to stay in a house near a brutal murder scene where you may land up being the next victims just in case they have any further questions.