Wild Eye Releasing, with
sales and distribution support provided by MVD Entertainment Group, has given a
long lead to the DVD debut of writer/director Elgin Cahill’s jumps-and-jolts
horror film, Beware the Lake. Dec.
12 is the street date … plenty of time to work this one!
It works like this, you
are new in town, the local high school is full of cliques and money is tight,
which means you get a job and work … you work, while the “mean girls” party and
do their cheerleading thing.
The new girl is named Tabitha
(Anja Knebl in her film debut), and normally she wouldn’t feel the wrath of
Blair (Ava Dalgaard — Hell Night: The Summoning) and her
tag-along followers, but when she catches the eye of Mason Clay (Jonathan
Lipnicki — you won’t recognize him, but this is Ray, the little boy, from Jerry
Maguire … he’s been a working actor since then) she becomes the target
for “payback.”
Mason was — that’s the
important part, WAS — the captain of the football team and college bound, but
that didn’t work out as planned. He’s
moved on, but Blair, who is now a senior, still views him as her property. He’s having nothing to do with that and when
he meets the down-to-earth Tabitha he is even more convinced than ever that the
shallow Blair is not his cup of tea.
This is the slow burning
fuss set-up for Cahill’s Beware the Lake. Sympathy for outcast Tabitha and a genuine
dislike for Blair and her posse of cheerleaders (aka: the victim pool), which
leads us to Blair’s plan to put the new girl in her place.
After giving her the
needle at work (sequences filmed at The Sasquatch Outpost in Bailey, Colorado),
Blair does a 180 and invites her to join the girls for a trip up to the nearby lake
(a tradition). She foolishly jumps at
the chance to “belong” and joins them on the long ride to the secluded lake,
where they dump her. To dig it in just
a little deeper, the evil Blair invites two backwoods hillbillies — Wyatt (Cody
Dermon) and Charlie (Jason Knauf) — to join the “party-ready” Tabitha at the
lake, who is soaking wet and down to just her panties and bra — yup, Blair took
her clothes.
The attempted rape goes
south and Wyatt, who is none too smart, ends up killing Tabitha and in a panic
dumps her body in the lake. Now the
horror can begin!
You have to give kudos to
Anja Knebl’s performance as the revenge-seeking Tabitha, who systematically
kills her tormentors one-by-one-by-one, and does so by looking creepy — zombie
like — and wearing next to nothing while going about her business.
Filmmaker Elgin Cahill has delivered a solid
horror tale, packed with Roger Corman-like screen jolts and has blended in some
nice comedy bits (various degrees of social commentary) to make the Dec. 12
street for Beware the Lake a date worth waiting for.
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