THE MERMAID: LAKE OF THE DEAD / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: SVYATOSLAV PODGAEVSKIY / SCREENPLAY: NATALYA DUBOVAYA, IVAN KAPITONOV, SVYATOSLAV PODGAEVSKIY / STARRING: VIKTORIYA AGALAKOVA, EFIM PETRUNIN, SOFIA SHIDLOVSKAYA, NIKITA ELENEV / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
Mermaid horror movies are not as novel a concept as one might imagine, the majority having stank and sank to the depths of DTV hell or perished in streaming site recesses. After the Dennis Hopper-starring Night Tide in 1961, there was a silent spate, but the past two decades have seen new mermaid horrors surface: Mermaid Chronicles: She Creature, Nymph, The Lure, Charlotte’s Song and now The Mermaid: Lake of the Dead, an appallingly-dubbed Russian hodgepodge of smudgy CG creatures, flat-pack teen stereotypes and a leaden script that feels like it scribbled in an inebriated panic en route to the first day’s shoot.
Teen student / swimmer Roma (Efim Petrunin) travels with best friend Ilya (Nikita Elenev) to a ramshackle family home gifted to him by his father. There, Roma is seduced by a malevolent mermaid from a local lake who, according to legend, makes people fall in love with her before murdering them. Following his shifty fish sex happenstance, Roma falls ill then is visited by his fiancé Marina (Viktoriya Agalakova) and sister Olga (Sesil Plezhe) who learn of the polygamous fish woman and how she could be linked to Roma’s mother’s death.
Despite intriguing concepts, The Mermaid: Lake of the Dead is a jerky, languorous and shady fiasco, slightly bolstered by snippets where the creature looks briefly freaky, but for the most part seems rendered into a fuzzy joke-shop smudge. The rest of the film is bungled by flunky dubbing, a patchy “plot” and generally slapdash production. A fitting vision is suggested but stifled by no-budget drudgery and inelegant execution which renders TM:LOTD wretched. An apt neon / noir palette should have strengthened nightmare and hallucination scenes if better realised with grotesque beasts birthed in weird scenarios, but the artistic dearth is vast.
The mermaid’s origins are relayed via narration during a flimsily jimmied-on intro, while a fleetingly intriguing ritual sequence resounds as floundered and bland. These contribute to TM:LOTD being a sodden, turgid muddle with clotted plot and plastic acting while a lack of dynamic character conflicts leave viewers indifferent and estranged. An arc about Marina being scared of the water and having to face her fears feels trite and not utilised to serve the narrative. The actors are hammily dubbed but, sadly, not hilariously so, bar a scene where Marina is attacked by a blanket, during which her conviction triggers an involuntary giggle twitch.
The Mermaid: Lake of the Dead culminates as a fright and laugh-free hash-out during which a few novel concepts are sloppily fashioned in a menial, shrink-wrapped narrative. It could have amounted to so much more.
