Ghost Lake [2004]

Writer-director-composer-editor Jay Woelfel has done a lot of no-budget work, scripting a 'Sex Files' entry and directing the likes of Trancers 6. This is an attempt to be a bit cleverer than that - though it opens clunkily with heroine Rebecca Haster [Tatum Adair] feeling guilty at her parents' funeral as she flashes back to the night she spent shagging a pick-up in the back of a car while they were dying of a gas leak. To get over it [or possibly commit suicide], she retreats to a cabin on a lake in upstate New York and glooms about, arguing with a fisherman, creeped out by an odd little girl [Azure Sky Decker] and beginning a romance with a long-haired sensitive guy [Timothy Prindle]. She also keeps bumping into corpses, many looking like folks she has seen around, and hooks up with a sheriff [Gregory Lee Kenyon] who tells her she has been contacted by the ghosts of various people who have gone missing in the lake and uses her talents to find the bodies [the mystic pattern requires thirteen drownings over thirteen years].

It's obvious this is one of those pictures in which supporting characters turn out to be ghosts, but at least the heroine realises that too - suspecting her boyfriend is dead before he does ['Stan you're never around when anyone else is ... your cottage doesn't look as though anyone lives in it because you're not alive']. Shot on video with the regulation iffy acting, it does a few odd things technically - like elementary split-screen effects and home computer CGI ghosts. At the morgue, wet bodies come to life as twitching body bags or gloopy puppets, and there's business about different types of ghost, incorporeal and fleshy, and their unfinished businesses on Earth, plus too many revelations about thin characters to take in, especially since many are immediately revoked when the dead turn out to be in a complicated conspiracy to take advantage of the heroine. It seems Rebecca is fated to join the dripping gang ['everyone you love dies, because you are supposed to be one of us'] but the ghosts actually need her to drown herself for their own evil purposes ['now we can leave this dead lake and kill!']; they are thwarted when Rebecca not only doesn't drown but saves the little girl [or her twin] who ought to have been 'the thirteenth victim'.

A nice thread is that it seems Rebecca is a patsy for the ghosts because, like most of them, she has guilt feelings about killing others - though at the end she defiantly tells the head spook her parents' deaths weren't her fault, and in the coda is told this again by their ghosts. Okay, so it's awkward, ungainly and overlong, but at least it's more ambitious than the slasher/monster shenanigans usually found at this budget level.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

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