Blood Lake sucks harder than its fiendish creatures

It’s never safe to go back in the water.How have people not learned that by now? I saw Jaws 2 in the summer of 1978 and haven’t been in the water since. Hence, I’m still alive to write blogs about some of the shittiest movies ever made.

You know it’s bad when you go in expecting bad and get much worse. You know it’s worse when Animal Planet tries to pull off the kind of trash movie that the SyFy Network has already mastered.

In Blood Lake Shannen Doherty and her family have their summer ruined by these things called lampreys. They’re basically leech eels, so the movie should have been called Eelches, but apparently, lampreys are real. I guess Animal Planet wanted to educate horror fans about one of the wonders of nature. SyFy would have known better and just called them Eelches for ratings.

You are never going to believe what happens in Blood Lake.

–       In the first scene, a maintenance worker for the water system gets killed immediately when he’s out doing his job alone.

–       Shannen comes with her wildlife expert husband, played by Jason Brooks of Baywatch and other TV shows, to a small town having a fish population problem. The couple has—brace yourself—a rebellious teen daughter and a smart, geeky young son.

–       Their neighbor is a horny chick who hits on the husband and the pool boy. Think her hot tub seduction plan will score her the specific type of eel she’s wishing would make her squeal?

–       An old man by the shore is attacked and killed. Think his dog will get away safely?

–       There’s panic at the shore when swimmers are attacked. Will the mayor, played by Christopher Lloyd in his worst role ever, close the beach instead of worrying about the revenue brought in by tourists?

–       Do you think the cost of greed will be Christopher Lloyd dying a humiliating and h(anus) death at the hands (or mouths) of the eelches? Oh. Spoiler alert if you didn’t guess the correct answer to the previous question.

–       A body washes up on shore. Do you think something might pop out of it during the autopsy?

–       Shannen’s husband insists she and the kids leave the town for their protection. What do you think his rebellious daughter does instead?

–       Everyone is either killed or gets the hell out of town except for Shannen’s family, as they spend the last half hour looking for each other because none of them seems to understand the words, “Just stay here where it’s safe.”

–       Do you think the solution to the problem might be getting all the eelches in one place so they can be annihilated in one shot with, say, electricity?

–       Do you think there might be hitches in the family’s plan and that the only non-family member, hottie Zack Ward (better known as Scut Farcus from A Christmas Story), will sacrifice himself to save them, stop the eelches once and for all, and give the terrified audience another much needed death scene?

–       As the family finally gets out of town, the now homeless dog catches up with their vehicle and hops in. I sure hope my dogs would grieve a little over me instead of snuggling up to the first family that drives by.

–       Someone from the cleanup crew learns the hard way that the town isn’t completely eelch free….

Other familiar faces in need of a paycheck include the always delightful Rachel True of The Craft and Fred Stoller, the sound-alike cousin on Everybody Loves Raymond, whose comedy shtick is awkwardly injected into the film and met with an “Is he serious?” by another character. I’m convinced the actor was ad-libbing actual thoughts. Was this cast of well-known actors directed to act terrible?

The amount of stupid shit that happens made it impossible to take the movie seriously, yet the tone of the film didn’t allow me to not take it seriously either. And the movie fails to be, either funny accidentally or on purpose. The eelches taking to land and seeking people out is bad enough. The entertaining stupidity gets worse….

The homeless dog suddenly appears out of nowhere, rips an attacking eelch off the little boy, then runs off. Shannen, her daughter, and the pool boy stand beside a hot tub full of eelches, waiting for the police to come; the second the police officer walks up to them, eelches decide it’s time to jump out of the water and attack. Guess they prefer a man in a uniform. And when a weed whacker is used to get an eelch off someone’s cheek (taking part of his face along with it), it becomes clear that not even that weapon of choice is being used for camp value. I’m with Mayor Christopher Lloyd. Keep the beach open and let them all die.

I guess my favorite part of the movie is when Shannen Doherty says that an eelch “looks like an anus with teeth,” but part of me was thinking, “How dare she insult such a beautiful body part that way!” The CGI eelches were cool too…although, they looked like moving poo when they came up from the toilet bowl.

Normally, I would warn anyone not to get the DVD or even watch Blood Lake on SyFy. Instead, I’m going to highly recommend getting the DVD. Why? Because there’s a gag reel in which Jason Brooks and Zack Ward shake their booties for the camera…and then Zack grinds his crotch in Jason’s face. They seemed to really enjoy being behind the scenes. If only that clip had been looped for an hour and twenty-six minutes.