Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Written and directed by Andrew Christopher Erin
• Starring
  • Fay Masterson
  • Sandrine Holt
  • William Gregory Lee
  • Stephen Bishop
  • Salvatore Antonio
• Produced by Amy Green, Eric Thompson, Cassie Yoo and Julian Zolkin
• Executive produced by Jason Chae, Milton Kim, Mark Morgan and Guy Oseary

Many filmmakers treat genre conventions as a crutch. Take, for example, the slasher film (not a random example, of course, as the film we’ll be looking at in this review is definitely one): whether through cynicism or a fanboyish drive to homage earlier examples of the genre, most slasher films follow the paint-by-numbers steps laid out in previous slasher films with leaden tread and very little creativity except for little “twists” that are themselves a genre convention.

On rare occasions, though, a filmmaker will treat genre conventions as a format within which one can express one’s self, like a sonnet or haiku. In these cases, such genre conventions are not treated as obligatories thrown in for no reason aside from genre expectation, but as integral parts of the story; those conventions are internalized, as it were, and treated as original parts of an organic story rather than as bases to be touched in order because those are the rules.

The Blair Witch called; she wants her shtick back.

Andrew Erin’s Sam’s Lake isn’t a perfect movie; in fact, it has some annoying flaws deep enough to mar it irrevocably. But the story Erin tells, flaws and all, is done with enough honesty and creativity that the genre conventions it encompasses seem new and fresh, rather than threadbare devices employed because, “Hyuk, hyuk, let’s make a slasher flick just like the eleventy-billion already out there.”

In our prologue, at a large institutional building at night, a figure breaks the (curiously not barred) window with his elbow. He promptly bleeds to death. The end. No! I’m kidding. He, a teenage boy, vanishes into the night. Some time later, also at night, the boy (now much dirtier) appears in a sleeping woman’s bedroom. She wakes and sees him, and her scream echoes as we cut to…

…Our main characters, who are all a posse of twenty-something friends with just enough diversity to remain plausible (as opposed to the standard “jock/nerd/slut/headbanger/etc.” character set who would never interact in a single social circle in real life). Dominik (Salvatore Antonio) is an Italian fashionisto running a small upscale shop in the city. Melanie (Megan Fahlenbock) is a petite blonde who’s involved with Franklin (Stephen Bishop), an African-American who’s never been out of the city. Kate (Sandrine Holt of 24 and Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)) is a semi-Asian who has “final girl” written all over her. And the titular Sam (Fay Masterson) is the girl they’re all supporting; it’s been a year since Sam’s father died in a hunting accident, and they’re all going to her lakeshore cottage six hours out of town as moral support on this anniversary.

“Rustic!” “Unique!” “A great fixer-upper opportunity!”

Yes, that’s right — a bunch of city slicker friends out to a cabin in the woods. Not only that, the inhabitants of the small town nearest the lake are wary of outsiders; the local storekeeper offers a veiled threat/warning that “these parts ain’t safe this time of year.” I’m not going to pretend that any of this is fresh. But what is fresh is the way that director Erin handles all of this. All of the characters are given time to be characters, not cliches or stereotypes. The dialogue is believable, relaxed, and comparatively unladen with shoehorned-in exposition. The camera lingers on the beautiful autumn scenery so that we believe how attached Sam is to the locale and how much the others come to love it as well. If we hadn’t read the DVD cover, we wouldn’t know this to be a slasher flick; we might assume it to be a Big Chill-type drama.

Of course, it is a slasher flick, and while all of the character scenes are charming, eventually we have to get down to business. Jesse (William Gregory Lee), a local on the lake with whom Sam’s grown up every summer, comes by and attracts Kate’s attention. That night around a bonfire, after Franklin’s attempt at a spooky “Have you checked on the children?” story fizzles, Jesse recounts, with Sam’s help, the local bit of folklore: in the ’50s there was a local boy who was violent and unmanageable, so he was sent as a pre-adolescent to an institution. He broke out several years later (yes, this is the scene we saw in the preamble), made his way home over several days, and murders his parents and his sister. The killer went off to live in the woods and was never caught; the murders took place in the boarded-up house that Kate noticed on the drive to the cabin. The house, naturally, is reputed to be haunted.

Eventually, the gruesome tale becomes the excuse for a journey to the haunted house, where people jump at small noises and generally get freaked out, and Franklin finds an old leatherbound journal in a fireplace that had heretofore been boarded up. Back at the cabin, they discover that its his journal — the adolescent killer of fifty years before…

“Hey, look — a leaf! Boy, they have everything in the country!”

Now. You need to realize that a full two-third of the movie has gone by.

“But almost nothing has happened!” you say. Yes, that’s largely right, although the almost nothing we’ve seen has been beautifully shot and lovingly written. But yet, it’s awful thin to occupy the first two acts. “But if this is supposed to be a horror movie, then all of the horror-movie stuff has to happen in the next half hour!” A little less, actually. And that’s definitely a problem. It’s hard to ramp up to full speed when more than 90 minutes of the movie feels like it’s been setting the stage.

Also at this juncture we get the first plot prop which is there entirely for convenience: the journal. And even more than the standard expository device, this journal is constructed for plot convenience. It holds a scant four entries, each roughly a decade apart, so that the characters reading it can have spelled out to them quickly The Gruesome Truth without having to pore over documents.

Ah, yes, The Gruesome Truth. There is also, right here, a twist to the story, which I don’t intend to spoil. I will say this, though: it doesn’t work. A good twist forces the viewers to reevaluate the narrative up to that point and realize that they’ve been misinterpreting what was right in front of their faces (The Sixth Sense is the standard example here). If you try to do that with the twist in Sam’s Lake, though, you find out that previous scenes make nary a lick of sense, most especially those which were from the point of view of characters about whom The Gruesome Truth is so gruesome.

For a serial killer, like setting out a buffet.

This next isn’t technically a spoiler, but it’s close enough to warrant the precaution: I’m sick of characters who can seem entirely sane for months on end to their closest friends and then suddenly turn out to be so batshit insane that there’s no way they could have hidden it.

So we’ve got three major flaws which coincide at this point: the realization that the movie is going to cram its whole horror-movieness into the third act, an intelligence-insulting iteration of the “found journal” cliche, and a twist which unapologetically contradicts much of what we’ve already seen. I wouldn’t blame anyone who lost enough trust in the movie that they simply turned the movie off in disgust. If they did, they would have missed some well-shot chase scenes, as well as acts of violence which were understated in their gore effects, and more effective for that. Competent, but not enough to resuspend anyone’s disbelief.

If someone had consulted me at the script stage (which, really, everyone should do), I would have advised them to trim some of the beautiful character bits and move the revelation of The Gruesome Truth up to the end of the first act instead of the second. Yes, we would have lost out on some of the interpersonal interactions that made the first two acts worth watching (although some of it could have been salvaged and used later), but the most interesting part of the movie wouldn’t have felt rushed. I’m all for defying genre conventions, but there’s also an obligation to give the audience what they pay for.

“It’s… it’s a cookbook!”

Despite what I can only see as near-fatal flaws in Sam’s Lake, I’m still impressed with how Andrew Erin was determined to make a slasher flick that behaved like a fresh story. I’m intrigued to see more of this writer-director’s output.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 8
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0