Dir: Ralph Portillo
Release Date: 1997
“A group of teenagers drives to "Fever Lake" to spend the weekend in a cursed house near the lake despite warnings from the locals.”
Fever Lake stars Corey Haim and Slater from Saved by the Bell and is boring as fuck.
It claims to have been made in the late 90s but looks like it’s from the previous decade in terms of clothing.
We begin as a man stalks and kills a woman with an axe. She has previously hidden their son and tells him no matter what to stay up in the attic. It would have been better if he had stayed there for the rest of his life, but maybe they thought this film was a better idea.
The kid survives even though his dad can clearly see him and even shouts, “You’ve got the curse, boy!”. Maybe he just couldn’t be bothered to climb up into the attic after some exhausting chasing and subsequent axe work. Both father and son share a glowing green-eyed moment.
Cut to years in the future (they don't tell you how long for some reason) and Corey Haim is clearly that same kid grown up at High School/college.
Haim, Slater, some other prick and 3 bitches set off on a trip to....... Fever Lake!!!
A white guy with long hair pretending to be a Native American (the guy, not the hair), warns the outrageously blonde sheriff that 'the Evil is coming'. We all know by now that part of being a small-town Sheriff is to ignore all warnings from mysterious Indians/old locals and he fulfils this part of his job throughout the whole film.
A wolf even turns up, with its own cool drum theme tune, hangs around while it is suggested it attacks a girl who dies from getting red stuff on her face and just fucks off again.
Nothing else really happens for an hour except people mention the lake a lot, locals refuse to talk about ‘what happened’, cars stop working, lights go out, people have bad dreams and the Native American steals the Wolfs theme tune for his fire side rituals (by ritual, I mean he is just sitting by a fire and staring).
Naturally these late teens decide to play hide and seek and someone finally starts to kill everyone else with an axe.
There’s also some kind of demon melting girl knocking about the place, but she may well have wandered in from another film.
Who could the killer be? Nobody knows!
Surprisingly, it's Corey Haim of course with his Incredible Hulk style glowing eyes. We get lots of close-up shots of the axe swinging about in the air and some blood splatter but no real decent deaths to talk of except when the axe seems to impale both people while they were fooling around and lodge into the floor behind them. How big was the blade? How sharp must it have been? How powerful must the blow have been for that to happen? Never mind any of that as, in the next scene, it is just in the guy’s back.
Oh well. Forget it.
Naturally, there is a kind of epilogue after all of this to explain what happened to us as the stupid audience and to throw in what they clearly think is a very clever twist but was incredibly obvious from the start.
After the killings, the Sheriff decides to burn the house down, but the Indian tells him that that won't work. True to form, the Sheriff ignores him and, even truer to form, the Indian is right.
The Indian wanders off with a voice over saying that the Evil is at rest. Until the next time...!
I really would have enjoyed a Vincent Price laugh like in Thriller but no, all we get for our time and painfully lengthy torment is just Corey Haim turning round in the back of a car looking at the camera and trying to both smile and appear menacing like Anthony Perkins smashed out of the park at the end of Psycho.
I now feel guilty for even mentioning such a difference in class of both actor and film.
Apologies.
Anyway, I have no idea whose car it is or why Haim is still sitting in it about 2 days after the killings but, after 90 minutes of nothing but boredom, I don't really give a shit.
The film is constantly awful from the minute Haim turns up, with the brief 15 minutes of killing just tagged on the end like they forgot they were making a Horror film until it was almost too late.
I simply cannot recommend this film to anyone, even if I really hated them. Which is why the link right HERE will take you to a place you can buy it!
FAVOURITE CHARACTER: The wolf and his theme tune
FAVOURITE MOMENT: None whatsoever
FAVOURITE LINE:
“You’ve got the curse in you, boy!” as it the only line I remember
FAVOURITE DEATH: The amazing axe through 2 people trick only for it to be ruined by a continuity error shortly thereafter
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