ZOMBIES (1982, by his own ad- mission one of his less compel- ling pictures), so it could have gone either way. The subplot of the sen- timental relationship of Helena and her zombie father might have its roots in James Whale’s FRANKEN- STEIN (1931)—namely an inver- sion of the Monster, little Maria and the lake (the way Antonio Mayans moves, especially when he’s on the attack in the tavern, suggests the influence of Karloff’s monster rather than a zombie)— but in Rollin’s hands, these scenes evoke the tender rela- tionship to childhood shown in his own films, while Helena’s nostalgic ties to the lake are akin to Rollin’s attachment to the beach near Dieppe, an au- tobiographic detail from his childhood that figures in so many of his films and a place where many of his characters have been put to rest. The char- acter of the woman reporter likewise feels related to the woman photographer deter- mined to capture a shot of THE LIVING DEAD GIRL in Rollin’s film of that name, made in 1982. We also see Rollin’s anonymous “Michel Gentil” touch in the way the film’s nude and sex scenes are shot: the former playful to the point of silliness and the latter shot with- out interest. Left to Franco, such scenes would have likely become more erotic, fetishistic and obsessive, and the overall film would surely have played less sentimentally, but it’s open to doubt whether it would have been better. But the fact re- mains that no director’s input would look good given the lousy standards of production in evi- dence here: makeup that falls off the monsters’ faces, the seamful hodge-podge Daniel White score taken from at least four other movies, the hopelessly flat acting of little Anoushka, and
the laughable attack on two lov- ers whose only visible point in common is that they are both wearing atrocious wigs because neither one of them wished to be associated with this picture in hindsight.
For all its faults, the film’s backstory manages—in a man- ner analogous to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD’s relevance to American homes and their rela- tionship to the encroaching shock waves of the Vietnam war and its returning veterans—to dredge up material from the postwar European subcon- scious pertaining to guilt over the uncomfortable, suppressed memory of a divided Europe. Whether or not you like ZOM- BIE LAKE, it’s the only instance of a European horror film that deals directly with Europeans having to place country before family, to betray loved ones in order to conquer the evil to which they became allied. It is all the more appropriate, then, to have Howard Vernon, who first rose to fame for playing a Nazi sub- marine officer in Jean-Pierre Melville’s La Silence de la Mer (“The Silence of the Sea”) cast as the town’s avuncular but two- faced mayor, as he ultimately gains the cooperation of little Helena, recruits her to his cause with words about the common good, and finally betrays her trust—solidifying this pathetic little shocker into an earnest en- treaty to be wary of our leaders. It doesn’t take guts to steer a film about underwater crotch shots in that direction, just a determina- tion to win back one’s soul a little as one goes about prac- ticing one’s craft and paying one’s bills. Did TWO-HEADED SHARK ATTACK bother? ZOMBIE LAKE was last re- leased on DVD domestically by Image Entertainment as part of their “Euroshock Collection” in
early 2001 (“The Most Terrifying Zombie Massacre Ever to Come to the Screen!”). Redemption’s discs are remastered from the film’s original archival 35mm negative, which now receives its titles in whatever language from digital overlays, so the Image re- lease marks the last time this film will look like film titles embed- ded on the same celluloid as the image. In every other way, Redemption’s remaster is reve- latory, not only bolstering the color and crispness of the im- age but also reintroducing differ- ent levels of daylight, affecting the way certain scenes are read and felt; for example, the flashback scene of the villagers pushing the soldiers’ dead bodies into the lake now takes place in the waning light of day—not Magic Hour, but before nightfall, giving the scene a more strongly covert feel. The film is framed at 1.66:1 with the main titles in French— strangely, Le Lac des Zom- bies rather than the theatrical release title Le Lac des Morts- Vivantes. The presentation is visually flawed only momentarily when a 7s patch occurs be- tween 18:58-19:04, missing negative replaced by an interjec- tion of far lesser quality. Likewise, just prior to this, the French soundtrack dulls in clarity, flat- tening out for more than 10m, from 18:50 through 29:40. Oth- erwise, the improvements permit- ted by the surviving negative element are significant, even if they do relatively little to improve the film’s performance.
Extras include the English
titles (“ZOMBIES’ LAKE”), two al- ternate “clothed” sequences of the opening single and later group swim (2m 2s and 3m 58s, respectively—the latter ends in a dialogue scene stripped of its verbiage), and the same theatri- cal trailer in French and English (2:55).
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