From The Depths - Beware The Lake

From the Depths is back in full force now. Back in your faces and hiding in the lowermost parts of cheap movie bins and floating under the lowest tiers of your favorite streaming services. The movies that you normally pass by and ignore. Maybe you even feel like slapping them in the face with your disdain. Well, a metaphorical slapping as a movie has no face! So, prepare your DVD slapping self for anger and wonderment as From The Depths returns again. This time we bring you a tale of love, death, lakes, bears and faulty water beds. Prepare for...

Beware The Lake!!!

Beware the Lake is a 2017 revenge thriller starring Johnathan Lipnicki, you know the kid from Jerry Maguire and the Stuart Little movie. Starring is a bit of a misleading word, as Mr.Lipnicki is in the first half of the movie and then just disappears with the explanation that he is "At Work."

The movie itself follows the story of Tabitha, a mild-mannered girl, who just wants to get her life on track after moving into a new town. She runs amuck of the local cheer squad, who proceeds to get her killed. Tabitha's aunt curses them, and the spirit of the girl comes back to get revenge on those who had wronged her. As vengeful ghosts are known to do.

There are a lot of problems with Beware the Lake, AKA The Lake. The first one is that there is very little "lake" to beware of in the film. I mean that poster alone shows the piles of skulls the lake has accrued in its perverted attempt to stare at that poor girls behind. Yet, the lake makes a short set of cameo spots and is never really seen again. "Beware Tabitha", or "Beware The Corpse", or even "Tabitha Jones Ghost Killer" would all have been better titles for this film. Yet companies still never shoot me a line asking for sweet alternative titles to their films. One day...one dayyyyy.

I think I may be getting ahead of myself. Let us jump back to the beginning. The year is 1908. The place, Romania. The time, most likely midday. Two Romania children decide to play hide and seek in the woods near their homes. After a rip-roaring time where both children have a chance to hide behind their favorite trees and yell "Found you!" in Romanian at each other, tragedy strikes. The girl Anca, frozen in fear can only look on as she has come face to face with...A Bear! Of course, the bear instantly devours her, leading her parents to do the only sane things a Romanian couple can do in 1908 Romania. Try to hunt a killer bear in the middle of the night with a hatchet, while simultaneously using the powers of a witch to bring her daughter back to life.

We then jump to the future as we watch a group of very slow working and bored looking movers heave boxes into Tabitha's new home. It is here her new neighbor Max, wanders into her home uninvited and asks to help. This leads to a ton of awkward conversation and an invitation to a party at his house. What ensues is a set of events seen in many a teen high school movie before so I will sum up. The Cheerleaders don't like Tabitha because Mason, Max's older brother has eyes for her. So, like the Romanians before her, the cheerleaders take the only option open to them. The group drugs her, takes her to the lake, leaves her there in her underwear and then proceeds to inform the town sex offenders about the whole scenario. It is here that I would like to point out that while the "Lake" has officially now become involved, the local sex offenders are unsurprisingly a worse villain than a stationary body of water.

Moving on, Tabitha's aunt makes an appearance cursing all of the neighborhood for good measure. This causes the ghost of Tabitha to start stalking the dreams of those involved, prompting the movie to reference "The Matrix" as having a similar plot...okay. Tabitha's attacks get worse and worse until she finally kills one of her rapists in his kiddy pool at home. She begins to kill the people using their dreams, and water, which I assume is from "The Lake!" It is only after a few deaths that the head cheerleader, Bubbles, or maybe it was Candy, begins to wonder if maybe something terrible happened to Tabitha. I mean she was left drugged, half-naked and alone in the company of the two members of town that top the registered sex offenders list. Saying "I didn't think anything bad was going to happen, it was just a joke!" Doesn't really make it better.

Tabitha's soggy killing spree continues as she starts to off each person one by one until Max's younger brother Mark uses the magic of the internet to learn how to speak Romanian, translate the aunt's curse, and trace it back to a tiny village in the old country. This village apparently still uses curses and black magic, as well as high-speed internet to chronicle it all. The teens learn that they have to give Tabitha a proper burial or her spirit will never stop killing. The group then heads to the lake to find her body. Yes, this means another high-end lake cameo happens as the teens learn that if you leave a body in a lake it apparently floats away.

Without the body to bury, Tabitha basically kills everyone left she wants too, including the head cheerleader in a not so twisty ending where I think you were meant to believe that the girl that started this all was going to live. *Spoiler* She doesn't. I am assuming Max and Tabitha's half-naked ghost then live happily ever after with no following consequences.

There you have it. Beware The Lake is a bit of a let down in how little they showed the lake, and how we were never given a chance to "beware" it. I did appreciate the short video at the beginning about Romanian bear safety and would have to say my favorite character was the child-devouring bear, who I am naming Ruffles. As always complaints, suggestions, and just plain rude comments can be sent to dasbob@dasbobsworld.com.