Friday, April 9, 2010

Beware Nazi Zombies when skinny dipping

Zombie Lake (1981)
Starring: Howard Vernon, Pierre-Marie Escourrou, Marcia Sharif, Robert Foster, Anouchka Lesoeur, Youri Rad and Burt Altman
Director: Jean Rollin
Rating: Three of Ten Stars

French resistance fighters toss a bunch of dead German soldiers into a lake that was cursed by witches centuries before. A decade later, they emerge from their watery grave to rape and drown skinny-dipping girls and murder villagers.



This is one of those movies where you wonder if anyone read the entire script at any point during production. The film is disjointed with the various plot threads barely connecting or seeming to have drifted in from another movie, the characters' behavior inexplicable at almost every turn, and the zombies being inconsistent and just downright weird.

The inconsistency and weirdness of the film, however, also keeps it entertaining. Time and again, you will marvel at the the Olympic-record setting leaps of logic by characters, gasp at the Grand Canyon-sized plot holes, and shutter at the thought of what sort of writers would come up with the perverted zombies featured in this film. Not only are they Nazi Zombies, but they are Rapist Nazi Zombies. (Of course, any girl atheletes dumb enough to go skinny-dipping in a lake as dirty as the one in his film probably needed to be drowned and raped by Nazi Zombies before they had a chance to fill the world with idiot offspring.)

A steady flow of "did I just see what I thought I saw/hear what I thought I heard moments keep the movie entertaining in a trainwreck sort of way, but the Three rating is about as low as it can possible go without being a Two. It reflects the fact that as awful as this movie is, it's never boring. Heck, compared to "Oasis of the Zombies" (which was produced by the same crew of French film bottom feeders) this is an outright masterpiece.





Speaking of "Oasis of the Zombies", click here to read my review at Movies to Die Before Seeing.

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