I don’t know if I’d called Maxim Van Scoy, and Christopher Phelps’s “Lake Nowhere” a masterpiece, but I have to say that the more it unfolded, I appreciated its enthusiasm more than anything. It wants to deliver a genuinely retro horror experience, and by god it succeeds most of the time. I’m not completely bowled over, though, as “Lake Nowhere” is really only fifty minutes in length. Five of those minutes are devoted to some faux horror movie trailers you’d find in front of a cheap horror VHS.
That’s all well and good, and I love faux trailers when they’re done well, but maybe some of that time could have been devoted toward elaborating on some of the more inexplicable moments of “Lake Nowhere.” I like a nice retro experience, but I enjoy a great movie so much more. The other forty five minutes is “Lake Nowhere,” a pretty good horror thriller that succeeds in being utterly eerie from time to time. It’s “The Burning” meets “Evil Dead” where a lot of the film unfolds in a series of unusual horror scenes that don’t make too much sense until the home stretch approaches. A group of friends go in to a cabin in the woods to party for the weekend. After reciting an incantation, an enigmatic being from the woods is conjured up and begins stalking them one by one.
When one of the friends returns from a swim seemingly in a trance, the group awakens in the middle of the night to find he has been possessed and is apparently a violent flesh eating monster. If that’s not enough the being from the woods is stalking and slashing all of the friends attempting to escape and it’s a seemingly impossible foe to defeat. “Lake Nowhere” works as a nice little homage to the horror of the mid to late eighties. While I didn’t love it the whole way through, it shines in many moments, including editing, ace gore, and a pretty creepy finale that ends in a question mark. “Lake Nowhere” is a lot better than most indie odes to the VHS age of late, and I’d recommend it for folks in to a quick nostalgia trip with a horror flavor.
Now on DVD/Blu-Ray and VOD from Brink Vision.