The Monster of Phantom Lake (2006)

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

THE MONSTER OF PHANTOM LAKE is another indie homage to the 1950s B-movie sci-fi genre of old directed by Christopher R. Mihm. The main problem with it is that the titular monster has very little screen time although it looks great and the times when it is on screen are great fun. The rest is a middling mess of annoyingly campy acting and dialogue which the writer thinks is far funnier than it actually is. The tale concerns a soldier turned into a ravenous monsters thanks to an accident involving toxic waste but for the most part this is merely padded out with dreary teenagers in their woodland camp and 'cool it daddio' type dialogue. It might have worked better as a 10 minute short.

A professor, his grad student/love interest, and a group of partying teens are terrorized by a soldier that was mutated by atomic waste in a local lake. Made for next to nothing, this is done in the style of a 50s B&W B-movie. The acting is intentionally hammy (which wears off its cuteness in, oh, about 3 minutes) and the monster design is intentionally silly. The movie is way overlong--the titular monster doesn't even show up until after an hour! Up until that point, the audience is subjected to endless "Will they/won't they" situations among main characters, goofy scientific speculations, and endless campfire dance sequences. While not a terrible movie, the "old B-movie imitation" thing has been done already (and with significantly more entertaining results) in movies like The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, Psycho Beach Party, and The Day It Came to Earth. The Monster of Phantom Lake, while obviously a labor of love, brings nothing new to the table and is hardly fun to watch. Definitely skippable.

This is an independent movie filmed in Minnesota. It's a fun take-off of 1950's B-grade monster movies and was deliberately campy fun. Filmed on a budget of probably about $8.00 (and most of that was likely gas money), it satirizes the stilted dialog, cheesy special effects, and hokey plots that have made 1950's era monster movies timeless guilty pleasures. It even has some appropriately corny music added. Shot in black and white, the entire film takes place in the woods near a lake, and starts with some workers illegally dumping "atomic waste". Predictably, some highly implausible biological responses result. Equally predictable, are the set of teenage victims who first discover the "monster". Fortunately, the unflappable Professor Jackson is on the spot with his not-so-secretly adoring graduate student assistant. Needless to say, it was a hoot. After the movie, some of the cast was in the lounge to mingle with the audience and to sell the DVD and posters. (The poster was free with the purchase of a $10 DVD and yes I bought it.) Almost as much fun, were the 1950's newsreel clips shown before the movie, as was the custom then. They showed, in order, newsreel footage of violence in the Middle East, a grim old couple celebrating their 75th wedding anniversary, and a knife-throwing Mom using her kids in her hobby. All-in-all, it was a fun movie that I highly recommend.