Horror Movie Review: Ghost Lake (2004)

I sure do have a soft-spot for low-budget, bargain-basement, straight to DVD, early-to-mid noughties horror films like this. The ones that come with bad stories, bad effects, and bad acting, but have nostalgic charm through sheer stubbornness. Ghost Lake is one of those films and I had ruddy good time watching it, even if it left me incredulous at times.

Written and directed by Jay Woelfel, the story of Ghost Lake is based around a lake and some ghosts, unsurprisingly. The former, somewhere in upstate New York and the latter, hanging around the lake as their homes exist under it. How and why? Well, many years ago a dam was built, and the town was flooded to create the lake, drowning some residents in the process.

It’s a solid premise, but one that is wasted as the lake’s history is never explored any further. Instead, the film’s focus sticks to dry land and the character of Rebecca, played by Tatum Adair. She is in town following the deaths of her parents, something she blames herself for, and meets the mysterious Stan, played by Timothy Prindle, who she can’t help but fall for. However, strange things are going on, and she quickly begins to suspect that the lake might be haunted.

What do these ghosts want though? Something about being able to claim living bodies again, though they’re only able to do this after a certain number of years. Timing!

It’s a dumb rule, but easy to gloss over, as the why and how if it all is hardly important. We have ghosts haunting a lake, so cue blueish-green looking people spitting up water and some cheesy special effects, that’s all that matters.

It’s entertaining stuff, especially as poor Tatum Adair and Timothy Prindle have to play it so straight. The former absolutely flounders, but can you blame her? We’re introduced to her character, Rebecca, in the most absurd of ways, where her parents insist that she go out clubbing all night because she’s not been out in ages. She insists that she will be back early, but her parents push her to let her hair down. So, she does. Meeting a guy and banging him in a car. It’s not the first time she’s topless in this film either. Hilariously, the sex scene is cut with shots of her parents collapsing and dying from a gas leak. I am not joking.

It feels like the film wants the viewer to think of Rebecca as immoral. All for having a one-night stand and her character spends the rest of the film racked by guilt. Something the actor simply can’t get right. I never believed that she was suffering, instead she comes across perturbed, which only gets more noticeable as the ghost story gets underway.

This is what brings Timothy Prindle’s Stan in, who has a past, but before that, believes all of Rebecca’s problems can be solved with his penis. I’d say he needs a couple of cold showers, but…

Though why anyone thinks sneaking into the house of a girl you’ve just met to ‘check up on her’ is a move, I’ll never know. The mad thing is that it kind of works, even though the pair have zero chemistry.

As you can tell, I enjoyed Ghost Lake for the bad acting and silly characters more than anything else. Which would be fun, except this is supposed to be a supernatural horror film. That is where I struggle to be positive, as not only is it uninteresting, it’s not scary. If that wasn’t bad enough, the film is far too long and filled with far too much filler. Enough that I suspect others will find it a chore to get through.