Zombie Lake(1981)

Zombie Lake is an odd little film. A clumsy arthouse mess of a zombie movie that's all over the darn place. And yet I find myself appreciating it much more now than when I originally saw it as a youngin. It ain't no Fulci or Romero zombie film yet its inconsistencies and low budget charm make it a unique experience in itself.

Zombie Lake(1981)

A bit slow moving, not unlike zombies, but not without some merit. German soldiers rise as the undead from a lake that is frequented by several bikini-less ladies. The zombies eat them first and then turn their sights on the town. Can a little girl stop them?

There are bad zombie movies (Zombie Strippers, Children of the Living Dead etc.) & then there is Zombie Lake. If I was to do a top 10 worst zombie movies it would be near the top, I can assure you of that.

Why Nazi zombies? Well you see during the German occupation of the town one Nazi soldier protected a female villager from gunfire. After nursing him back to health she promptly had sex with him & gave him her pendant. The soldier returns to his squad until eventually he is able to get back to her. By now she is giving birth to his daughter (Helena) & she dies during childbirth.

Shortly thereafter, this same one-eyed Nazi zombie kills another woman, apparently by spitting a bunch of strawberry jam all over her neck, and in the process manages to have some of his zombie make-up flake off and stick to her face. This second woman, I should mention, is not nude, but when the actors playing her father and his friends later solemnly carry her lifeless body into the town square, they makes sure that, as they do so, her dress is hiked up well above her hips.

Well, war waits for no man, not even a soon-to-be-zombie, so GNG jumps back into the army truck as he and his buddies head off to war once again. (Try not to notice the modern civilian car driving behind the army truck. Good grief!)

The film is set in France during the 50s (while my knowledge of 1950s France is quite low I doubt it looked like this), but there is a lake where Nazi soldiers were killed and dumped into the lake, but of course they come back as zombies and kill anyone nearby.

How about the F/X? The zombie makeup is so cheap looking it looks as if green paint was applied and to be totally honest anybody could get the same results if they tried. The zombies look like skinny versions of the Incredible Hulk!

The zombie stupidity hits its peak when Zombie Lake introduces the zombie father-daughter relationship, which Rollin presents in the hammiest of fashions. While these scenes are clearly meant to tug our heartstrings, they instead had me squealing with laughter. Watching a bug eyed zombie awkwardly interact with his (oddly understanding) daughter was almost too much for me to handle.

While there is of course gratuitous nudity, it is certainly less than in the previous work of director Jean Rollin. Though one scene in the lake in which several nude women are frolicking around with each other in waist high water, then suddenly cuts to an underwater shot of their splayed and kicking legs in much deeper water as the zombies begin their attack.

I gotta give it to Rollin, he didn't try to frame it as something to even remotely consider. Often they would try to spin their films in a way to make their work perhaps misunderstood. I'm the first to admit I like several of Franco's 70s films and Rollin's vampire films, but there is a certain low rent charm to Zombie Lake. I guess to me Zombie Lake is like the clinging barnacles on the zombie genre. We both recall how this film was often mentioned on the horror board. It maintained a presence just by its notoriety.

In a small village, somewhere in France, German soldiers, killed and thrown into the lake by the Resistance during WW II, come back.The story was written by Jess Franco, although I am not sure how much thought had to go into this one. The film was directed by Jean Rollin (who was ashamed of his own work), and the opening scene pushes even his casual attitude towards female nudity to its limits. They both have a respectable career to some degree... not sure how this ended up on their resume.Almost no effort was put into the Nazi zombies, who are just guys with a little green makeup smeared on their face. I can do a better makeup job in my bathroom, and they do not ask me to do effects for horror films. The people who were behind this should not be proud.This ranks pretty low on the "Nazi zombie" scale, behind "Dead Snow" and "Shock Waves", and even behind another Jess Franco film "Oasis of the Zombies". This is, indeed, among the worst... 041b061a72