Wicked Lake

2008

Maybe you've heard this one. Four smart-ass city kids wander into the backwoods where they encounter inbred rednecks who rape and torture the living crap out of them. There fate is foreshadowed by an encounter with half-witted masturbating locals at a gas station.

Yeah, I know it's the same plot as about a zillion other films, but this one does manage to come up with a twist. The four city-slickers are lesbian cannibal witches. That means they get some supernatural powers at midnight, which is when they pay back better than they got.

Unbelievably, this film managed to get reviewed by three major New York newspapers, which is astounding for a film of this caliber. For one reason or another, it was screened at one theater in New York in late June, 2008. I suppose the filmmakers might have thought at the time that a theatrical trial, however small, had to be a good thing which might lead to a wider release or major cult status. To the contrary. If a film like this goes straight to DVD, it only gets reviewed by genre site specialists who expect this kind of content, and the reviews are only read by people who are receptive to this sort of material. The theatrical release only meant that three legitimate critics were enraged by having to sit through ninety minutes of sheer garbage, and their resulting anger exposed the film's faults to a wide audience.

As the New York reviewers duly noted, this film is just atrocious if the filmmakers were taking it seriously. Any torture porn, even when it is crafted well like Eli Roth's films, is difficult enough for average people to watch because it's custom made for a unique target audience, so there's probably no movie-going experience more unpleasant than 90 minutes of grade-Z cheapjack torture porn. To make matters worse, the film's revenge theme fails because the women are as unpleasant as the rednecks, so there is no sense of audience empathy for them when they are in danger, and no catharsis when they rise up and give the hicks their comeuppance. "Bad guy against bad guy" is just not an involving story line, which is why you seldom see it used in wrestling, for example.

I couldn't figure out whether the scribes were right in saying that this movie is the worst redneck torture porn movie of all time, or whether the film appears lame because it was parodying lame movies. I think it must have been the latter, because the characters are too exaggerated, the dialogue too absurd, the violence too comically Tromaesque, and the acting too weak and wooden for it to have been anything but intentional. You can forgive the New York critics for missing that fact because many other films in this genre, like House of 1000 Corpses, already have their feet well inside the parody door, but never actually cross the threshold.

If you take it as a joke, Wicked Lake might even give you a few unpleasant laughs. In addition, the film is filled with enough extreme exploitation content for genre fans, including plenty of dirty talk, extreme levels of violence, and extensive female nudity from attractive women. Oh, I'm not recommending the film. Far from it. I'm just saying that it's not actually an utterly incompetent horror drama, but rather an extended joke that just didn't work.

Although that's not much better, is it?

Eve Mauro

Robin Sydney

All four witches: Carlee Barker, Eryn Joslyn, Mauro and Sydney