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Director: Jean Rollin
Year: 1981
Rating: NR
Running Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
A group of Nazi soldiers that were gunned down and buried in a lake rise from their graves as zombies and wreak havoc on a small French countryside town.
"Zombie Lake" is a low budget French horror film...well, at least the movie claims it's a horror. In reality, it's more like softcore skin flick with a few brief moments of dialogue and tons of badly made up zombies who just happen to be wearing Nazi uniforms. The film opens with a young woman walking up to the lake, stripping fully nude and sunbathing while the credits roll. Some time later, she then decides to swim in the lake, though there is a giant no swimming sign right where she stands complete with a skull and crossbones. Always a good idea! After quite a few minutes of her frolicking around naked in the water, a zombie with clearly pruny fingers attacks her and drags her below the water to her demise. This is kind of a reoccurring theme throughout this movie where women in various states of undress get attacked by these zombies over and over again with no real substance to it other than the fact that they were once just recently naked. The makeup in this film is rather atrocious and looks like what a 3rd grade trick-or-treater with free, full access to his mother's makeup drawer would wear on Halloween. The zombies are basically done up in green face and body paint with a couple of over-the-counter CVS brand scars and really fake looking blood. The movie is incredibly, painfully slow paced and it feels unbelievably long despite it being only about 90 minutes. By far, though, the worst part about this movie is its audio. It's not even fun or funny in an ironic way. Add this to some bizarre lighting choices where the same scene will go from bright lighted to dimly lit at the drop of a hat. There is one scene in particular where it appears a light blew out on set and the filmmakers just kept rolling because they couldn't afford to do another take. All of this is only matched by its horrible dialogue, which clearly had to be looped in post production since it doesn't match up with the mouths of the actors. The volume changes drastically from one scene to next, going from whisper quiet to painfully loud. The story is ridiculous and nonsensical even for a zombie flick. Just about the only part this movie is some unintentional laughs at how incredibly bad everything about this movie is, and even those are few and far between. There are a small percentage of people who will be able to sit through this only to laugh at its absurdity, but 99% of the people who see this probably won't make it more than 15 minutes into its run time before they turn it off and decide they have wasted enough of their life on it. Us, however, we enjoy torturing ourselves with shit-fests like "Zombie Lake," and it is more certainly one of the worst films we've seen from a technical and practical standpoint.
My Rating: 2/10
BigJ's Rating: 2/10
IMDB's Rating: 2.9/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: ---%
Do we recommend this movie: AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE!!!
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Two years ago, we were watching: "Poltergeist"
One year ago, we were watching: "Maniac"
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