Welcome
to Lake Nowhere, where all the kids are below average. Their hedonistic
indulgences, most definitely including sex, drugs, and booze will kill them
even quicker than C. Everett Koop would predict. 1980s VHS horror nostalgia
returns like a psycho-slasher who never dies in Christopher Phelps & Maxim
Van Scoy’s short feature Lake Nowhere (trailer here), which releases
today in a BluRay-DVD combo-pack.
Much
like Dude Bro Party Massacre III, Nowhere will try to recreate the lo-fi
pleasures of VHS tapes, but instead of a bootleg recorded from a UHF broadcast,
this supposed relic from the eighties tries to pass for a well-worn commercial
VHS tape, most likely released with the rental market in mind. It comes with
two fake trailers, one for a Giallo that looks like it could actually be the
real thing and an environmentally-themed body-horror-conspiracy thriller that
could have been released by Troma last week. There is also a brief
advertisement for Wolf White Beer, which would definitely aid the viewing
experience.
Okay,
so a carload of thirtysomethings acting like teens arrive at Lake Nowhere for a
weekend of drunken, stupid fun. When Bonnie finds a gravestone with some heavy satanic
passages while walking her dog Fozzie, she thinks little of it, because why
should she? Similarly, nobody is much concerned when Danny disappears for at
least twelve hours skinny-dipping. This is not an intuitive bunch, but so much
the better for the Masked Maniac. At just fifty-one minutes including front
matter, he will have to work quickly to make mincemeat of the revelers.
However, since he also seems to have some supernatural mojo going on, he should
be up to the challenge.
As
far as eighties slasher spoofs go, Phelps & Scow ace the look and vibe of vintage dead teenager movies, even
surpassing the relentlessly grungy Dude
Bro III, but they never approach the wit and inventiveness of Todd
Strauss-Schulson’s Final Girls. In
terms of quality and entertainment value, it probably ranks dead center between
the two comparison films. It certainly knows where it is going and how it
should get there.
