The Lake

A gigantic monster emerges from what must be a really big lake and unleashes its fury on a small town, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.

The Lake is a pretty straightforward monster movie from Taiwan. It’s about this gigantic godzilla-looking monster who, on most days, would otherwise prefer to hang out at the bottom of the local lake that, due to the size of the monster, seems like it’d be more fair to call it an inland sea, but then some human asshole steals its unhatched egg, unleashing a bit of honestly well-deserved fury on the small town where the asshole lives, all which happens during a huge storm.

The story then follows the townspeople’s efforts to figure out how exactly they can stop the monster from stomping everything flat before it's too late, and it takes them way too-god-damn-long to figure out that the gigantic egg that they’re driving around with is, much like alcohol… the cause of, and solution to, all of their problems.

In the end, The Lake is an admirable film if for nothing else than the amount of practical effects they use to make the monster come to life. Even the digital effects look pretty good. All of that stuff is really nice, a pleasant surprise really, which makes it all the worse when the half-ass story just kind of drags on and on and on. While it’s not exactly surprising that the human characters’ story is the least interesting and the least engaging part of a kaiju movie, its rare to find one that’s so dull. Even worse, the boring ass human character story drags so much, it actually gets in the way of the monster’s rampage, a true cinematic crime.

Unlike the recently reviewed Grandmaster of Kung Fu, The Lake did not understand the assignment.

Also, while I can’t blame the people behind-the-scenes of this film for copying a few of their scenes from much better movies like The Host and Jurassic Park, at this point, no one should reasonably expect it not to be completely obvious when they do it, so why even bother? It just makes you look like a hack. The dub was extra awful in this film too, so while you should always choose the subtitles, for this film, definitely do the subtitle version.

All in all? I was kind of looking forward to this film, but…

Meh. Disappointing.