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Beaver Lake Zombies (2003)



Beaver Lake
Zombies

 

Ever since home video cameras became cheap enough for the average person to buy, people have been having a lot of fun making bad, homemade movies.  Now that editing software is also affordable, it makes the whole project even easier to do yourself, but you still need a cast and crew to film most movies.  I suspect that much of the time, the movies are never finished because people bail out before everything is done, so it takes a certain degree of tenacity just to finish a film.  I'll give writer / director / producer Mike Hartman credit for seeing this film through to the end despite setbacks from bad weather, people bailing on him, and a total lack of budget.  Beaver Lake Zombies isn't best no-budget movie I've ever seen (in fact, it's far from it) but it was completed and released.  Since then, Mike has gone on to make more movies...hopefully learning from the experience of making this film.


When I saw the introduction by Troma head, Lloyd Kaufman, I had some idea of what I was in for, but Beaver Lake Zombies makes The Toxic Avenger look as big budget as Titanic.  This film is truly a homemade horror film of the lowest possible video and audio quality.  The shots are often very shaky and the camera goes out of focus when they zoom in.  The lighting is poor during the many night scenes.  The musical score is way too loud and mostly just a badly played distorted guitar or a badly played keyboard.  Due to all of the wind noise and overly loud 'background' music, the dialog is often too quiet to hear.  However, that's probably not such a bad thing because the dialog doesn't sound written.  It sounds like they turned on the camera and said, "um...just talk or something."  The zombie makeup consists of mainly white face paint with a bit of black face paint around the eyes and the gore is pretty much just lots and lots of fake blood.

The story is about a lake that gets polluted by a couple of guys illegally dumping some nameless goo that turns everyone into zombies.  The guys dumping the goo are the first to be turned into zombies.  Next up, a couple of gangster goons have just killed a guy and head up to the lake to get rid of his corpse.  When they arrive at the lake, the toxic goo turns them and the corpse into zombies.  A couple of hunters armed with pellet guns are then attacked by the previous zombies and become even more zombies.  The zombies then attack a young hiker chick and turn her into a zombie.  Meanwhile, a group of three guys and two of their hot girlfriends, Bambi and Barbie, have hit the lake for a weekend of fun and lots of talking about sex.  They are, of course, attacked by the zombies for the finale of the film.  Oh yeah, there's a scene with a naked guy running around in the dark background holding his junk.  That's the closest you'll get to nudity in this movie.  Overall, if you like to put on a super bad movie while drinking with your friends, Beaver Lake Zombies may be a good one for you.  If you'd like to learn more about this movie, check out the Silver Bullet Pictures website here:

silverbulletpictures.com


Gore-o-meter rating: 3 out of 5
(There is a large quantity of really fake blood - 3 for effort.)

Skin-o-meter: 0 out of 5 (The only nudity in this movie is a poorly lit naked guy holding his junk.)