Rating: 1.5/5
Hooptober XII | 6/31 | Countries 4/6 | France | Zombie 4/5
Outside of a French village is a lake the villagers call the Lake of the Damned. A young woman goes out to the lake, taking down a sign that warns her of death, and skinny dips. After several minutes, a Nazi zombie emerges and presumably kills her, though we don’t see that on screen. In the village, Chanac threatens to go to the mayor if the young woman doesn’t return by morning. When Chanac visits the mayor, he says they should wait and see if she shows up before calling the police.
The zombie attacks another villager and gives her a hickey, strawberry syrup leaking out of his mouth. Oh, wait, no, he’s eating her, she’s dead. The villagers discover her body and congregate around her as three men carry her to the mayor’s office. The men are careful with her, yet ensure that her skirt lifts so the audience can get a peek at her panties. The mayor appears, lamenting that they cannot bury the woman until they determine the cause of death.
A reporter, Katya Moore, arrives in town to investigate the “weird lake.” The townspeople send her to the mayor, who knows the most about the town’s history. She brings the disgruntled mayor a book, and the two discuss why the lake is “damned.” The name comes from events that started 10 years ago, during WWII, when the Nazis occupied the village.
If I tell you any more, I’ll be telling you the entire plot. The rest of the movie is that flashback, and the Nazi zombies killing more people.
The movie is shoddy work. Shots last way too long. The makeup is bare, and the prosthetics are always on the verge of falling off. No one emotes except for the occasional crying and/or screaming woman. The camera work is slipshod, mostly consisting of a handheld camera that shakily moves about a scene, as though surprised by each person who speaks up. The movie makes hilarious use of juxtoposition to reposition the lake’s proximity to the village according to who gets killed next — in the first kill, it’s quite a way away, and in the next, it’s apparently right next to the village.
As others have noted, this movie went through three different directors. While Franco worked on it, the producers slashed the budget. Rollin came in as a favor to the producers. While Rollin worked on it, the producers wouldn’t show him the script, as only one copy of the screenplay existed. When Rollin finally saw the script, he inquired about locations, and the producer would tear out the pages for that scene, and they would continue elsewhere. Everyone on set could tell it was a shit show, so they put in way less effort.
That said, these are professionals, so the movie isn’t an incomprehensible mess. The film has a couple of moments, brief glimmers of a better movie that could have emerged from this project. For example, the Helena subplot is occasionally touching and really snaps the movie into focus. But those moments are buried under the film that is — the one that reflects the lack of care that extended from the producers downward.