Zombie Lake (1980)

Reviewed on Oct 17, 2001 under Horror |

aka Zombies Lake

Directed by “J.A. Laser” (aka “Peter Chevalier,” aka Jean Rollin)
Written by “A.I. Mariaux” (aka “Peter Chevalier and John Fortuny,” aka Jess Franco)
Starring
- Howard Vernon
- Pierre Escourrou
- Robert Foster
- Anouchka

[Note: I had been holding this movie on my shelf for Month of the Living Dead for quite some time. Then, mere weeks ago, Ken at Jabootu's Bad Movie Dimension posted a review of it, and I despaired -- for as you already know if you move in these circles, Ken's reviews are exhaustive; he manages to cover every single aspect of a movie, leaving no comment necessary thereafter. So I did the only thing I could: I declined to read his review until after I had done mine. That way I could still pretend I was doing something worthwhile. Sure, you might ask why I would bother writing a review that was rendered irrelevant before I even wrote it, but if we follow that train of thought we might end up asking why I even review these videos in the first place, and I don't even want to go where that road leads, Bucky.]

French horror/erotica director Jean Rollin has a small but devoted cult following in this country — small of necessity, in that very few of his friends have been translated and given much of a release in this country. That’s changing thanks to outfits like Redemption Video (they may not get a lot of respect, but it beats buying tapes from bootleggers), but Rollin is still not a household name, even in the horror fandom community. All of which makes the Irony-O-Meter go off the scale when you realize that the Rollin-directed movie that’s historically been most widely available on this side of the Atlantic is one that he directed under a pseudonym, not wanting to be associated with it.

Zombie Lake (or, as the print titles it, Zombies’ Lake) is an example of a sub-genre of the zombie movie: the Nazi zombie movie. Even further classified, it’s a member of the sub-sub-genre of the aquatic Nazi zombie movie (of which I can think of only one other example off the top of my head, Shock Waves; I’m sure one of my six or seven devoted readers will be sure to fill me in on any others). As you can tell, this would be a genre easily lending itself to exploitation flicks, especially in the hands of European directors, since the Italians had already spent more than a decade doing sleasy Nazisploitation cinema by this time. And, as the story goes, legendary trash director Jess Franco was slated to helm this one. But the budget was too small, and he didn’t want to do it. Let me repeat that, for those who have not grasped the import: Jess Franco said it was too cheap a movie for him to make. That’s like Albert Pyun refusing to direct a movie because it’s too disjointed and sluggish. It’s like Michelle Bauer refusing to play a role with too much gratuitous nudity.

“Halt! Vhere are you going vith that vheelbarrow?”

Instead, Franco wrote or co-wrote the script (under the name A.I. Mariaux, or maybe A.L. Mariaux, or possibly John Fortuny — more later), and somehow convinced (or blackmailed) Rollin into directing. Even in Europe, Rollin had never had the kind of financial success that Franco had had, and his name got attached to several work-for-hire projects through the period, but still, I just gotta wonder if saying, “Hey, didn’t you direct Zombie Lake?” at a convention would get you a slug in the mouth. With that in mind, Rollin’s name appears in the cast credits for his role as one of the police inspectors, but the direction is actually credited to “J.A. Laser.” At least on the print; for some unknown reason, the box for the T-Z Video release I own lists the director as “Peter Chevalier.” For that matter, the script is credited to “Peter Chevalier and John Fortuny.” Given that neither name exists in any reference on this movie (including the IMDb), I can only ask, “What the hell?” A side note, for full disclosure: A fellow named “Juan Fortuny” did write and/or direct several thriller and horror features from the ’50s through the ’70s, including co-writing the script for 1971’s Orloff and the Invisible Man with none other than one Pierre Chevalier. In other words, wherever possible, whoever made up the box for T-Z relied on some other reference than the actual credits on the print; the vague terms of the hyperbolic back-cover copy and the fact that none of the four images featured on the cover are actually from this movie bolster that theory pretty well.

Alrighty then. 750 words into the review, and we might actually be ready to talk about the movie. And yes, I am stalling. Because it is a bad movie, which pretty much goes without saying (although it’s not as appallingly bad as the comments of thin-skinned neophytes would make it); but more than that, it is a silly movie. Oh, yes — a very silly movie.

Unlike my other review this week, Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, this movie has no problem getting down to business right out the gate. First thing we see is a lone girl, headed to the lake for some skinny-dipping, pointedly ignoring the warning sign; I couldn’t see clearly what it said, but I’m sure she would have looked at it a little longer had it said “WARNING: UNDERWATER NAZI ZOMBIES LURKING TO GRAB SOME SKINNYDIPPING TAIL.” Pity, that, because that’s exactly what happens; a one-eyed Nazi zombie swims up from the depths, admires the view for a minute as the girl swims around, then grabs her and drags her down.

The locals in the nearby small French town take this with the reserved nervousness which is the specialty of all small towns with a violent past. A few people supplicate the mayor (Howard Vernon — just to add to the confusion, he was also in the aforementioned Orloff and the Invisible Man), who has apparently been mayor long enough that his name has officially been changed to “Mayor, The”. And he hasn’t maintained his position by going off half-cocked, no; he decides to give it some time before he calls in the police.

Fighting the war — of LOVE.

In the meantime, our peripatetic zombie clumps out of the lake and attacks a woman with a wheelbarrow and drinks the blood from her neck. (French women are like Dorito’s apparently; you can’t eat just one.) The locals respond by silently carrying her bloody corpse through the streets and laying her at the mayor’s door. Beats a petition any day. The mayor responds by, um, reading a book. (SEE the breathless reading action!)

About this time, a reporter woman shows up in town, impressing the local lotharios with her brazen cigarette-smoking ways. She’s looking for a story on the lake — not because of the disappearance and the murder, but simply because it’s always had a bad reputation, being known as “The Lake of Ghosts” or “The Lake of the Dead” or other unsavory titles. She goes to visit the mayor in his little castle (I dunno what’s up with that, but I’d certainly love to live in a little castle with gargoyles and statues of knights in little alcoves all over the exterior), and he explains to her why the currently-living villagers hate the lake: [cue flashback harp-runs] Back during the war, the local resistance mowed down a contingent of Nazi soldiers, then dumped their bodies in the lake so other Nazis wouldn’t find them and unleash some Aryan whupass. That, at least, is the gist of what he tells her (or what we see in flashback right after he leans back in his chair and says, “It was the war…”) that relates to the question she asked. But he apparently also tells her about how one of the German soldiers had protected a local girl during an Allied bombing raid (SEE a prone figure leap up and run when fire from a “bombing” accidentally sprays all over him!), and she rewarded him by taking him to a hayloft and demonstrating that French girls do not, in fact, wear underwear. (She also gave him a distinctive necklace to remember her by. Really distinctive. Like, “I bet you’ll remember it when you see it again” distinctive.) On the day that the Nazis withdrew and this young hero got killed, she also gave birth to a girl named Helena, then promptly died.

Back to the present, then (a rather loose designation — expect a longer discussion on this further down the page), as a women’s volleyball team stops on the edge of the lake in question and does exactly what we men all think that women do when we’re not around, i.e., get naked and start splashing each other. Now, we know exactly what happened last time a naked chick “took the plunge,” and it happens here again; a whole horde of Nazi zombies swims up and drags the girls down, leaving one survivor to run into town (topless) and scream about the lake before collapsing in the pub. Now there’s something you don’t see every day…

“Ach, what an ugly little spud.”

The mayor finally calls the police (when you mess with our nudist volleyball team, you get smacked down!), and since the town is apparently too small to have its own police, the area constabulary sends over two skeptical inspectors, Stiltz and Ram (Stiltz being the one played by director Rollin, but honestly, I didn’t bother to remember if he was the tall skinny one or the fat moustachioed one) who, in classic law enforcement style, put all of their efforts into immediately alienating the locals, both at the mayor’s office and at the pub. Their work in town finished, they go out to the crime scene to get eaten by the living dead.

In between Stiltz and Ram’s antics, we also have the Main Scene — the one that people remember, and that has garnered it more ridicule than any other single element. Because the heroic German guy (whom I shall refer to hereafter as “Fritz”) comes back as a zombie too, and as he and his comrades clump along the road, he recognizes the house that used to be his ladylove’s, and entering finds his daughter Helena, now about twelve or fourteen years old. There he stands, patchy blue and green greasepaint signifying his deceased status, and Helena looks at him with a moment’s mild puzzlement, then recognizes the necklace her mother had given him (as shown in the portrait of Mom that she keeps near the head of her bed), realizes that this is her father, and smiles warmly. (No acknowledgement of the fact that the post-war French weren’t much enamored of live Nazis, much less rotting reanimated ones.) The music swells…

…and Nathan says, “No wonder Rollin kept his name off this.”

Anyway. Once the zombies are up for the day, they decide to make a mess of the town (sorta like me, rudely awakened on a Saturday morning). One interrupts a couple making out; one crashes the pub scene and, since everyone ran out and no one will play with him, proceeds to overturn all the furniture. One interrupts a girl bathing in a vat in the back yard while wearing her black bikini briefs (I don’t make’em up, folks, I just report’em). One bites a young woman who had stopped to adjust her garter. (I’m seeing a disturbing connection between the display of female skin and the “raising of the dead,” if you know what I mean.) Then off they go back to the lake, warmed with the satisfaction of another job well done.

You gotta be kidding me.

Deciding that the last thing they need to feed the zombies is another couple of twit policemen, the locals decide to form their own little army, and wait for that night/day to shoot them full of holes — which works about as well as you’d think.

And then Fritz comes back for another visit with Helena (what part of “every other weekend” doesn’t he understand?) and out they gofor a stroll. In fact, Fritz strolls her right back to the lake, where the other zombies take exception to her presence. So Fritz has to fight the main objector, which means that two ill-made-up actors roll their eyes, grunt at each other, and wrestle like they’ve got two-by-fours strapped to their elbows and knees. SEE the deadly zombie-fu in action! (And you gotta wonder what the other zombie thought he was going to accomplish by pulling a knife — um, already dead, remember?)

The mayor figures out the bond between Helena and Fritz, so ghe persuades her to help with a plan suggested by the reporter girl (she’s still around?), to trap them all in the old mill and burn it. Your dad would want to be released, he says, and he’d tell you if he weren’t a completely nonverbal zombie. So she agrees, and they put a vat of blood in the mill, and she invites Dad in for lunch, and he invites all his army buddies, and then she runs out, they bolt the door, and they use a flamethrower to squirt napalm in the windows. Burn burn burn, the end.

Now, I would like to point out, while this movie is bad from beginning to end, there are signs that Rollin is actually a skilled director who produced good stuff when given adequate money. The entire flashback, for instance, is almost completely without dialogue, allowing the situation to tell its own story. And the scene where the body of the second victim is paraded silently through the street is effective, if hard to explain.

But alas, there’s no way Rollin can overcome the unintentional humor of the “loving reunion between zombie dad and daughter” scene, and there are so many other laughable factors that he really had no chance.

**Are you sure Jess Franco didn’t direct this?**

The makeup, for instance. Of all the deficiencies of budget, it appears the makeup guy got the shortest end of the stick. Thus, our fearsome “zombies” are blokes with aquamarine greasepaint smeared unevenly on their faces, with their necks only patchily covered and their hands completely rosy-looking.

The music is just as patchy. It lurches clumsily between the electric-piano incidental music, the schmaltzy “father-daughter reunion” theme, and the almost cartoony “La, la, la” tracks that accompany the skinny-dipping scenes.

Thanks to the low budget, there’s also very little sign of the period in which this is supposed to take place. At least they could afford Nazi uniforms and jeeps for the World War 2 flashback, but the “present” of the movie — which would have been maybe a dozen years thereafter — is very much contemporary to the production date, with the halter tops on the various skinnydipping victims (not to mention that VW bus). Of course, I ciould try to make the argument that they were actually following Marvel Universe continuity, but I’ve already expended more energy defending aspects of this movie than makes me comfortable.

The last damning complaint isn’t to be laid at the feet of the original production staff, but it reeks nonetheless: dubbing that makes the worst kung-fu import seem like location sound. Half the time, it seemed that the voiceover talent was making up the script on the spot whenever they saw a character’s lips move. At least the zombies had no lines; they looked ridiculous enough, without sounding ridiculous too.

Given that there are (to my knowledge) only two underwater Nazi zombie movies, it’s no shame to be the worst one ever made. But I really wish they hadn’t worked so hard to earn that distinction.

[Postscript note: Having finished my review, I am now free to read Ken's review, and it's just as I suspected -- his depth covers everything I noted, and more. We both even managed to dub an unnamed character "Fritz" (although it must be noted that they are different characters). And you won't get the wealth of background information in Ken's review, but as I've already admitted that that was mostly stalling, that's scarcely a point in my favor.]