Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 7:9	Budget Low

Jean Rollin. When you start out in a craft, you are a novice. If you get lucky, you become an apprentice working under the guidance of a master. Years of hard work can make you a journeyman. A journeyman has the skill of a master without the experience to temper the work he does. This last step may be the hardest. When you are given all the tools you need and your job is to produce something artistic, that's when the struggle really begins. And that is where Rollin stalled. He is able to complete a movie and do a good job visually but never really seems to get a great movie in the can. Yes, I know he rarely had much money to work with and never really had great scripts, but most great directors have dealt with these problems. Jean Rollin, Richard Gabai and Fred Olen Ray can all be trusted to bring a movie in on time and on budget, just don't expect art. These guys are all journeymen directors producing movies with all the important bits (good lighting, decent editing) without that annoying habit some directors have of doing 20 takes of a scene to get it perfect. Rollin is a lot like Buck Flowers, sort of a movie gypsy, in fact he plays one of the cops that become zombie chow in this movie. He directed a few hardcore films and a lot of softcore, just one of those guys doing whatever it takes to stay in the movie business.

Which brings us to Zombie Lake. As the movie opens we see swans swimming on a lake. A pretty girl walks up to a pavilion by the lake and takes her clothes off. So far, so good. After a quick look around, she decides not to put on her bathing suit and proceeds to work on her tan while the credits roll. Soon it is off to the lakeside to take a swim pausing only long enough to uproot a sign that has icons on it indicating that swimming in the lake is deadly. After wading a little ways into the lake, she dives underwater and the camera switches to an underwater shot showing her in about 10 feet of clear water. As we cut back and forth between the above water shots and below water shots it become obvious that the underwater shots were done in a pool somewhere. Above water shot; girl swimming in lake with lots of lilypads. Underwater shot; girl treading water in a pool with a couple of lilypad fronds thrown in. Perhaps Rollin thought that we would be distracted by the nudity, but seeing how we have two or three minutes of this, eventually you do notice.

This is where a journeyman director has a chance to become a master. Either insist on finding an actual lake to work with or spend the time in the editing room to clean up the underwater shots. As neither of those things were done and as the scene went on for way longer than is necessary, you know you are in for a film with a mediocre director.

As best I can tell the story goes something like this, the Lake of the Damned has been known to reanimate corpses since Roman times. Most of the townsfolk seem well aware of this, though only the mayor seems to have a real handle on the concept, but still it seems odd that when the French Resistance kill a few German soldiers no one says anything when they decide to dump the bodies in the lake. Hmm, dump the bodies in the lake known to create zombies or bury them in the woods. Oh, what the hell, throw 'em in the lake. This bit is told in flashback and it is hard to tell if the zombies have been plaguing the town for the last dozen years or not. One of the problems with European movies has always been the really hard-to-follow narratives. First you have the tendency of the directors to be very visual, then you have the producers who don't want to spend money on translating too much dialog (most films would be translated into German, Italian, Spanish and English) and then pay for dubbing. As a result there is rarely much dialog and what there is tends to be badly translated and I have often suspected some of the voice talent taking liberties with the lines they are given. At one point in the movie a van full of girls drives up to the lake. Apparently the townsfolk' concern about the dangers of the lake has not gotten to the point of replacing the sign vandalized by the girl during the credits, and so after hitting a volleyball around for a while, they all take their clothes off and go for a swim. Again we are treated to multiple underwater shots of the girls that are clearly shot in a much deeper pool with frequent cuts back to the lake where it is obvious they are standing in about three feet of water. It seems the director got to see the rushes of the first scene because now there are curtains dropped into the edges of the pool so instead of looking like underwater shots in a pool they look like underwater shots in a pool with drapes in the background.

After a while, the zombies run out of naked girls to kill and start munching on townies. Soon a couple of police detectives arrive on the scene to investigate. Somehow both are killed by the slow-moving zombies. This scene involves much standing around on the part of both detectives while patiently waiting for the zombies to sneak up on them. So here's the thing. Zombies are slow. They shuffle around making a lot of noise and they smell bad. It's a little like having a garbage truck sneak up on you. Being taken out by a lone zombie is easily one of the least impressive deaths I can think of. Imagine the scene at Valhalla:

John Paul Jones: I went down with my ship. (mild applause for the assembled heroes)

John Entwistle: Too much cocaine and too much sex with a girl half my age did me in. (laughter and applause with many wink-winks from the assembled heroes)

The cop from Zombie Lake: A zombie snuck up on me. (embarrassed silence from the assembled heroes)

Anyway, the first part of the movie mainly involves zombies killing naked girls. A reporter shows up to do a story on the Lake of the Dead. The mayor then tells her the story of The Lake of the Damned in flashback. After the townies make a couple of unsuccessful attempts to fight back, the reporter suggests that napalm could substitute for the "sacred fire" that is the only thing that can kill zombies. Perhaps it is just me, but Dresden and Vietnam make me associate napalm with hellfire, so this bothered me a little. Eventually the good zombie who really wants to be completely dead helps lead the rest of the zombies (all five of them) to the mill so that they can be hosed down by a flamethrower.

If when you are watching the flashback scene you think you are having a flashback yourself, relax. Someone cut most of this scene into one of Jess Franco's films. It usually goes by the name of Virgin Among the Living Dead. As Zombie Lake was actually written by Jess Franco (and this by the way explains a lot about the movie's incoherence), I suppose you can't call it outright stealing.

The movie is just about worth watching for the amazing quantity and quality of naked girls. It is also kind of amusing to watch the terribly obvious cuts from lake to pool and to see the cameraman clearly reflected in the mirror at the mayor's office when he talks to the reporter. Still the movie is paced much the way a zombie walks; slowly, clumsily and without any real sense of purpose.

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