Review: Zombie Lake (1981)


Zombie Lake (1981)
Director: J.A. Laser / Eurociné

Description from Netflix:
During World War II, a group of villagers ambushed and defeated a band of German soldiers and threw their bodies in the nearby lake.  Now, the Nazis have returned as angry zombies, preying on unsuspecting teen swimmers and skinny-dippers.

My thoughts:
The above description should tell you just about all you need to know.  Especially the part about skinny-dippers.  Oh man...for a lake as filthy as this one, it's amazing how many skinny-dippers there are.  Young women find their way to the lake and immediately think, "I need to take off all my clothes and get in there as soon as possible."  And they do.

While all this gratuitous nudity was going on (I'll estimate that 30% of this movie was naked ladies), there was a backstory about one of the Nazis and his daughter.  While he was stationed in this town, he knocked up a resident.  He was then killed, because he was a Nazi, and that's what you do to Nazis.  So, on top of killing nude co-eds, he also wanted to reunite with his daughter.  Because even though he was a zombie, he still held his memories he had while living (like Colin or Bub).

Needless to say, it was a terrible story.  They writers decided it really wasn't worth their time to flesh out any of the characters or their motivations or anything.  Am I asking too much of a softcore-zombie-porn?  Probably.

There were a lot of laughable parts of this movie (on top of the obvious nudity, which I feel has been covered pretty well).  The make-up was atrocious.  Like, visibly-rubbing-off-during-scenes bad.

Most of the zombies walked around like regular people, if a little slower.  But this joker thought he was Karloff or something.  Seriously.  No other zombie moved like this.

To say this was a terrible movie would be about the best review I could give it.  At times, it was borderline unwatchable.  Honestly, I felt a little uncomfortable watching it at times (that had less to do with the nudity and more to do with the fact that it felt like it was made by a Nazi sympathizer).  The handful of laughs didn't make up for the rest of it.

If you're looking for a good Nazi zombie movie (and who isn't?), I highly recommend you go with Dead Snow.

Zombies: they seemed to be pretty standard zombies.  No super-strength or anything like that.  Regular gunshots didn't seem to stop them (although I can't vouch for headshots, because I'm not sure any of them were actually shot in the head).  However, the thing that separated these zombies from your Romero zombies was the fact that fire killed them.  Anyone who knows zombies knows you should never set one on fire: it won't kill them, and now you have a flaming zombie to contend with.  But it seemed to work for these guys.

- Dusty 'D' Evely

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