Fever Lake

A bad script, a bad director, and bad acting make this a bad movie all around. This is your generic teens-gone-camping horror flick, but couldn't they have done SOMETHING better with the script than this? There are so many plot holes and things that don't make any sense. About the only good thing I can say about this movie is they had a great special FX team. They put a fuzzy thing on Corey Haim's lip that almost looks like a moustache.

Let's put some wrong and offensive assumptions other reviewers have made to rest. Michael Wise may not look like the stereotypical Native American some commenters have in mind, but he is an Indian. According to his LinkedIn page, he has served as the president of both NAFTA and the Native American Caucus EEOC, so I seriously doubt he's a white man. He has also worked as an actor and stroryteller at the Autry Museum of the American West, and has been an active voice for indigenous peoples for years. People should educate themselves about stereotypes instead of accusing others of perpetrating them....not all Indians look like the pictures in your childhood history book. Every review referring to him as a white man should be corrected.

OK, now that that's over with....the talented Mr. Wise must have lost a bet (oops, that just popped out), because this is not a good film in any way, shape, or form. It's slow, boring, terribly acted, and a snooze-there is barely enough slashing to make it a slasher! But seriously, what did you expect? A bit more from Corey Haim, tbh....he should have l been able to act rings around the rest of the young cast. But even he, Bo Hopkins, and a way over the top soundtrack couldn't save this mess. Two stars-it's dreadful.

I am not a movie snob - I am always on the lookout for low budget indie gems that are well made for their budget and talent pool.

This is not one of them.

I watched this because I like Corey Haim. I wanted to like this movie because he was in it. But I can't. I just can't. This movie is so bad, I don't think putting all my favorite actors in it would have made a difference.

Corey Haim, Mario Lopez, and Lauren Parker were the only ones who seemed to know how to act. Everyone else seemed wooden and out of place. When a dangerous moment was supposed to be happening, everyone ran like they were out on a leisurely Sunday jog. The pacing of the story can be described the same way, which made me keep checking the time to see how much I had left.

There is literally nothing redeemable about this movie. Nothing in the script is written very well. Not the characters, not the plot, absolutely nothing. The only back story that exists is with one of the main characters, and it's the one you can tell from the beginning who the perp is going to end up being. They give it all away from the start. There is no real mystery or reason for the audience to engage with the story at all.

It's a completely pointless slasher flick. But wait! Aren't there a lot of pointless slasher flicks that are still entertaining? Sure there are - and compared to this movie, they are Oscar winners.

I don't have a problem with movies that employ a lot of ambiance. This is one example where manufacturing ambiance doesn't do any justice whatsoever. There is zero skill in camera angles. Even the music is awful. The costumes would make K-Mart designers go on prozac. It's like they went to a church bazaar, bought a mystery box and dressed themselves blindfolded. I know it's 1996, but even by 1996 standards they were dressed pretty horribly.

There's a lot of reviewers that believe this movie must have been made in the early 1980s, THAT IS HOW BAD THEY ARE DRESSED.

This movie is a total waste. It's a waste of time, a waste of celluloid, a waste of bandwidth, and it's even a waste to have a profile dedicated to this movie on IMDb. It's a waste of an hour and a half of your life.

RIP Corey Haim - even you couldn't save this piece of crap movie.

Okay, forget what I said in my user-comment for AMITYVILLE: DOLLHOUSE (1996). That movie might fail to impress, but it's stuff like FEVER LAKE that perfectly displays everything that's supposedly wrong with the 90's horror decade. Even Corey Haim and Bo Hopkins could not have saved such a dull and boring, unimaginative and uneventful, clichéd and generic movie without tense, scares and atmosphere. It's still better to not impress than to impress in a very bad way, the latter being what FEVER LAKE is good at.

Technically, it might not be the worst movie ever made. Far from, probably. But it's just so not worthy of anybody's time.

We get a prologue-scene (set in 1940), that had me vaguely remembering the opening-scene from MIRROR MIRROR (1990). Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing, as MIRROR MIRROR isn't really a bad movie. But then FEVER LAKE turns into total boredom for more than an hour, with three teen-couples spending some time in a house at a lake. During that, some pointless Indian mysticism is hinted at (some story about an evil spirit in the lake). Only one kill, by a force unseen in the woods (was that supposed to be a wolf possessed by the Evil Spirit?), which involves nothing more than a girl getting some blood smeared in her face. I have no idea why she had to die, really. Absolutely nothing significant happens, not even something remotely exciting.

The only thing that could have saved this movie, was taking the first 5 minutes long prologue sequence and just glue it onto the last 15 minutes (simply throwing that whole hour in between out of the window, as it is forgettable, useless material). Then you'll have a nice little horror-short, that will pleasantly make not the slightest bit of sense, but still is worth a watch because of some mildly entertaining make-up effects near the end. You could call the short-film "Hide and Seek at Mystic Lake". Why this title? Well, the last 15 minutes begin when the teens foolishly decide to go play hide & seek. Some teens get killed. A gross-looking possessed girl (that's my guess, at least) enters the ring. The Indian makes another cameo appearance to warn the frustrated sheriff. Corey Haim provides a misleading (or should I say "incomprehensible") shock ending. And... "The End". All this in 20 minutes that could actually evoke the impression that this strangely confusing short just might have enough interesting elements to base a good, coherent script on that could be turned into a halfway decent full length feature. But now, we have about 90 minutes of nothing, really.

Some people have described FEVER LAKE as some sort of tedious teen-slasher version of THE SHINING (1980). Really, folks, you're giving this movie way too much credit. It's just a snooze-fest at the lake. And if you, by any chance, just can't resist watching something with Indian mumbo-jumbo in it, then why not THE CELLAR (1989)? There, now you have three movies in this comment (minus THE SHINING, of course) that are infinitely more entertaining than FEVER LAKE. And they're not even good movies. This pretty much sums it up, me thinks.

When Fever Lake came out on video, my family and I rented it, because it was filmed in my home town. The town my father grew up in, and family still lives there. Twin Lakes, Wisconsin is such a small place it's not even a town, it is a village. So we all thought it would be cool, and we recognized a lot of places. "Fever Lake" is actually called "Lake Mary". You might think the movie would be good with Corey Haim and Mario Lopez who played "Slater" on "Saved By The Bell". This movie wasn't bad but it lacked something , and it wasn't the actors. Anyone who has seen the actors portraying other roles know that they can act. All in all, it was cool to see my home town in a movie(I still live 20 minutes away from it). One of the good parts(which it has a few) was the twist ending, sort of like "The Twilight Zone". If you feel like you've seen everything there is rent this movie, when you're in the mood for different cheesy horror movie. I'm not calling it a good or bad flick, because that is for everybody to decide with their own opinions. That's all I gotta say 'bout that. Peace. I'm out.