Zombie Lake (1981) Review

aka The Lake of the Living Dead

Zombie Lake would be a perfect movie to throw on during a party. It would be a great movie to not pay attention to, because as soon as you do, you start losing IQ points by the minute. The abysmal production values are definitely good for a laugh, and there's a shit-ton of nudity in there. Plus some zombies. But if you look beyond all that, you're just asking for trouble. Zombie Lake was directed by Jean Rollin, a French schlockster not to be taken lightly. For one, he's French. I applaud him for coming from France, the most pretentious country on the planet when it comes to film, and still featuring monsters and nude cuties in almost all of his movies. Also, I give him mad props for making the first French vampire movie (Le Viol de vampire in 1967) and the first French gore flick (Le Raisins de la mort in 1978). Just look at the years those were made and you get some sense of how uptight the French are when it comes to cinema.

That being said, Zombie Lake is complete crap. How bad is it? So bad that in each underwater shot you can see the wall of the pool it was filmed in. Not a single sequence cuts together correctly. The actors seem as if they had never seen a movie before in their lives and decided to guess their way through it. When the zombies walk, I couldn't help but picture penguins slipping around on a iceberg. And, last but not least, Zombie Lake has the single worst flashback sequence ever filmed. The flashback consists of the back story (the locals killed some Nazis during WWII and dumped their bodies in the lake) told by one character to another. In the midst of the flashback is an extremely protracted sex scene. I kept thinking, "So, is this guy describing ever little nipple twist and hip thrust, or what?" And to top it all off, the flashback lasts seventeen-and-a-half minutes. Gimme a friggin break here. The persistent presence of beautiful naked women was the only thing that kept me watching through the whole thing. And the flame thrower at the end.