There are very few horror films in which I can find no redeeming quality - and "Ghost Lake" has the dubious honour of being one of them. Although it doesn't feature the same level of technical ineptitude as, say, "666: The Demon Child", its unspeakably annoying "actors", awful dialogue (which, I'm sorry to say, is perfectly audible at all times), and pitiful visual effects all add up to a thoroughly reprehensible waste of an hour and three quarters.Add to all that the fact that the plot was gaffed entirely from a Matthew Costello novel entitled "Beneath Still Waters" (which, as luck would have it, is being adapted by the lovely Brian Yuzna) and you have a film that you simply can't like for any reason at all. Really.Well, that's not completely true. In the picture's defence, the scenes involving forcible expulsion of water from the mouths of various people are awfully amusing... for entirely the wrong reasons, of course. Please avoid this dreadful thing.

Ghost Lake starts at the funeral of Ruth (Linda Brown) & Richard Haster (Raymond Suriani) as their distraught daughter Rebecca (Tatum Adair) looks on, not feeling that good about things Rebecca decides to head to her parents cottage in a small town near Rushford Lake. On her way Rebecca picks up a hitchhiker named Stan James (Timothy Prindle) who also lives near the lake, they quickly become friends as Rebecca still feels bad about her parents & needs a shoulder to cry on. However, things take a turn for the worse as a terrifying set of events happen to Rebecca, first she finds the body of a dead fisherman in the lake, she sees zombies walking around & a strange girl keeps popping up. Sheriff Dobbs (Gregory Lee Kenyon) reveals that Rushford Lake has a dark & sinister past that Rebecca feels is the cause of her troubles. As Rebecca unravels the truth about the ghosts, zombies, bodies & the Lakes history she discovers great evil...Written & directed by Jay Woelfel who also appears in the film as a 'shadowy figure' & if that wasn't enough he also composed the music, is there no beginning to this mans talents?! OK, maybe that was a bit harsh but I personally thought Ghost Lake was a pretty dire film all round. The script takes itself extremely seriously & to be fair starts off alright as it builds reasonably well, it has a certain something about it that kept me interested but once all this nonsense about the 13th month, 13 victims & various other things that contain the number 13 kick in it all starts to become confusing, muddled & far too complicated. I don't think Ghost Lake makes itself particularly clear & that has to be down to the script & Woelfel, I don't think Ghost Lake comes across as a straight horror film as instead of going for scares & gore it tries to develop a complex mystery which just isn't that interesting or engaging, imagine a low rent The X-Files (1992 - 2002) episode. There is a good film trying to get out but unfortunately it fails, it's different & tries to surprise but I think it's predictable & I think twists need to be clever & relatively simple to work & be effective, Ghost Lake's twists are none of those things. Forget about any hordes of zombies rising from the lake as suggested on the DVD/video artwork, it doesn't happen as this is a straight faced ghost story rather than a zombie film.Director Woelfel was obviously working on a low budget so I'll cut it a little slack. Having said that it still looks cheap, bland, forgettable, flat & extremely dull. Forget about any scares, atmosphere or tension as there isn't any. There isn't any gore either, there's a few ghost/zombies & a few rotten corpses but nothing else, this is really tame stuff all the way.Technically Ghost Lake isn't too bad considering it's low budget shot-on-video origins, the best thing I can say about it is that it's competent. The acting didn't impress & I didn't like any of the character's particularly.Ghost lake is a pretty bad film overall, it has virtually no horror elements, the various twists are dull & just don't work out in any sort of satisfying way & the artwork on the box really is very misleading. Not recommended.

Becky's comment to Grandpa Tomson's question of "Why is all this happening" pretty much sums up my feelings about this gosh-awful flick, which rips off so many other decent movies it's hard to keep track. The cover had me fooled--perusing through the rental store, I thought I'd stumbled upon a zombie flick I hadn't seen yet (always a good thing), but it's NOT a zombie flick at all--zombies EAT people and traditionally don't talk, and that didn't happen here, so it can't be a zombie flick. Rather, it seemed to want to be a version of the far-superior "The Fog" (1980--not to be confused with its abominable wanna-be 2005 version). I'm a big one for an engaging plot and characters I can understand--this had neither. Even the guilt trip that Becky had as a result of her parents dying the ONE night she goes out in how long, made no sense. And about understanding it--I couldn't follow the line of logic, if it even HAD one. OK, the ghosts come back every 13 years--why?? Oh, wait, that one guy killed his dad 13 weeks after the little girl drowned, which was 13 months after someone else died...???? And the "death sequence" got totally messed up--OK, the dead couple dragged the young couple off the beach, then the young couple took the car-crash couple?? Does the newly dead person get to take another live person right away, or do they have to wait 13 years, or WHAT??? By the time the cop died, I stopped caring and just wanted to see how it played out. I should have listened to my DVD players, which started skipping about 1.5 hours into the flick. I finally got it to play to the end. Boy, that was a relief (insert sarcasm) here. The awards should all go to whoever designs the video covers--THAT was scarier than the entire film.

I was on vacation with some friends when one of them brought home, for our viewing... GHOST LAKE! It looked OK, and we wee bored out of our skulls, so we watched it... Oh, HOW I regret it! The special effects are AWFUL, and COMPLETELY unrealistic, the picture quality is bad, and the acting is horrible. Why anyone in their right mind would create this movie for people to watch is beyond me. The R rating should go to a I rating; Inaproprate for all ages! It got an R for "horror images and some sexuality." Horror? Please. A two-year-old would be giggling. Sexuality?*cough* No comment. Me and my friends were laughing our heads off by the fact that the girl is screaming at zombie that looks like it was made by 3rd graders. You can find puppets like that at your local toy store! It really is a sad, sad movie, and no-one deserves to be tortured into watching this movie. If you thinking of watching it, don't. Trust me.