After Dark 8 Films To Die For: Lake Dead (George Bessudo) 2007

The After Dark series has been a venue of independent horror movies which has been going on since 2006.  The commercials would have you believe these movies are the cutting edge of new horror and that only the big names in horror are doing them.  Well, what has Mr. George Bessudo done before Lake Dead?  Nothing.  I mean it, he has done absolutely nothing.  Look him up on IMDb, I dare you!  The whole series grosses in the tens of thousands which makes me scratch my head as to how this series has gone on so long.  Maybe they do well in DVD sales, but I can’t find the numbers to back it up.

Lake Dead is probably representative of the whole cinematic sh*t stain that is the After Dark series.  First off, doesn’t the title give you the impression that it will be a zombie movie?  But no, its an inbred slasher movie.  The story is about these sisters who are told a long lost relative has died and has given them a lakeside resort.  The b*tchy sluts, I mean sisters…along with their horny counterparts go to the lake and are picked off one by one by redneck rejects.

For supposedly cutting edge horror, this movie does nothing new.  Lake Dead is derivative in every way and just to name a few of the movies they rip off: Mother’s Day (which is also a sh*tty movie, but I won’t get into that now), Wrong Turn, Deliverance, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  Okay, so the story is a severely watered down version of better movies.  You would figure that Lake Dead would go the exploitation movie route and either give the movie explicit sex or large amounts of gore (or maybe both).  Since the movie is “UNRATED” you would think they would go over the top with the ultraviolence.  Again, no.  I would rate this movie a tame PG-13.  How can you have an inbred slasher movie and have no blood?

The acting is slightly better than a Troma film but to tell you the truth I would rather watch a cheesy Troma flick than this.  At least Troma tries to do something new (despite their financial limitations) whereas Lake Dead has a budget and a less inspired plot than my 1st grade Mega Man fan fiction.  While we are on the topic of inbreeding, I could be watching Tromeo and Juliet.  At least that has Lemmy from Motorhead narrating it.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, shitty movie.  Really none of the After Dark movies are any better.  They are all poorly acted, incompetently directed, and derivative of hundreds of better horror movies.  Heck, even watch the Masters of Horror series besides this.  They are inconsistent but even the worst Masters of Horror is light years better than these pieces of sh*t.