I have been watching some movies and doing small and quick reviews for them on Letterboxd, but I haven't really been in a mood to do longer reviews for here lately. Not that my last few reviews have been long, but longer than my Letterboxd reviews anyway. I've been considering just giving up my blog and doing the smaller reviews, but I still hang on to my blog. Even though I get burned out doing reviews, it has been a part of my life for a long time which makes it hard to give it up. Anyway, I got a code to get a free movie from Redbox last week. After checking their website to see what they had, I discovered the movie The Mermaid: Lake Of The Dead (2018). Since I love mermaids, even more in horror movies, it was a perfect match for me.
Marina (Viktoriya Agalakova) and Roma (Efim Petrunin) will be getting married soon. They have planned things out but then Roma learns about a cabin that is now his to take care of. Roma just assumes to sell it, but Marina would like to fix it up and actually live there. Roma's mother is said to have drowned in the lake that the cabin sits next to, but there is more to that story. A mermaid (Sofia Shidlovskaya) lives in the lake and is looking for someone to love her. Roma's father fell prey to the mermaid and his wife gave her life so he could live. During a bachelor party for Roma at the lake, Roma meets the mermaid and falls under her spell. Can Marina find a way to save him without giving up her own life?
The Mermaid: Lake Of The Dead was co-written by Natalya Dubovaya, Ivan Kapitonov, and Svyatoslav Podgaevskiy, who also directed. As you might be able to tell from the names, this is a movie from Russia. Despite some bad reviews on the Redbox website, I had hoped that I would still like this movie. I ended up being kind of disappointed with it actually. The story wasn't too bad here, with a creature looking for love, but the person will be doomed no matter if they love the mermaid or not. The problem that I had with the story is that it plays out more like a ghost story than anything else. I wouldn't have even known there was a mermaid in play at times, to be honest. When someone is in the water, they make sure to let us know that something is swimming by quickly, which is mermaid-like but we never actually see the mermaid. This Russian mermaid seems to lean heavily on the siren lore, which is sometimes mixed in with mermaid lore as well. This mermaid, known as Lisa in her human form, appears to be landlocked to a lake, which I've never heard of before. She has a siren-like song that captivates Roma when he hears it. There is a backstory to why Lisa is looking for someone to love her. It is actually an interesting story that could be played out anywhere in the world. Since the movie is dubbed, with no option otherwise, I just had to go by what was being told to me. It would have made sense if Lisa was a mermaid that falls in love with a human man, but the characters in the film seem to think that she became a mermaid after her "death".
We do get to see Lisa transform into a mermaid slightly, with an evil almost fish-like face at one point. Her face also transforms into other people, which gave her more of a supernatural power than anything else. To add to that, Lisa can seemingly appear and disappear at will, bath water turns to blood for no reason and arms come out of the water even though there was no way for anyone else to be in the water without being seen. I think I would have liked the story for The Mermaid: Lake Of The Dead better if they had just said that Lisa is a ghost and left it at that. The pacing of the film feels a little off at times. It starts kind of slow and feels a little too fast by the time it is over. There were some things that I did like about the movie at least. The backstory was interesting and not all that long. It still managed to explain everything that was needed to know though. I also liked how the characters went about trying to beat the mermaid. Unlike most films where they research the problem, these characters went off trial and error pretty much.
There isn't a lot as far as special effects go. The morphing seemed to be the biggest effect and the film never really gets all that gory. What we do get was okay. I wasn't all that impressed by it, but it wasn't what I would call bad either. The acting was the same way. I did like the lead actors but I wasn't that impressed by them. I did like Sofia Shidlovskaya as the villain here fairly well at least.
There was a bit of a twist towards the end with Roma's sister. Even though Marina and her soon to be sister-in-law was working towards the same goal, trying to save Roma, they had different ideas on how to do that which ended up with a small twist in the story. It mixed things up a bit and I could honestly kind of see a family member doing that. I didn't hate The Mermaid: Lake Of The Dead but I really wish they had done more with mermaid lore. I don't know, maybe mermaids are said to be like this in Russia. I haven't bothered to look, though a friend of mine has told me that mermaids are considered to be evil there. I wouldn't encourage anyone to go find this movie, but if it looks like something you would like then I would say to go for it.
2 out of 5 At least it really was a Lake of the dead
Marina (Viktoriya Agalakova) and Roma (Efim Petrunin) will be getting married soon. They have planned things out but then Roma learns about a cabin that is now his to take care of. Roma just assumes to sell it, but Marina would like to fix it up and actually live there. Roma's mother is said to have drowned in the lake that the cabin sits next to, but there is more to that story. A mermaid (Sofia Shidlovskaya) lives in the lake and is looking for someone to love her. Roma's father fell prey to the mermaid and his wife gave her life so he could live. During a bachelor party for Roma at the lake, Roma meets the mermaid and falls under her spell. Can Marina find a way to save him without giving up her own life?
The Mermaid: Lake Of The Dead was co-written by Natalya Dubovaya, Ivan Kapitonov, and Svyatoslav Podgaevskiy, who also directed. As you might be able to tell from the names, this is a movie from Russia. Despite some bad reviews on the Redbox website, I had hoped that I would still like this movie. I ended up being kind of disappointed with it actually. The story wasn't too bad here, with a creature looking for love, but the person will be doomed no matter if they love the mermaid or not. The problem that I had with the story is that it plays out more like a ghost story than anything else. I wouldn't have even known there was a mermaid in play at times, to be honest. When someone is in the water, they make sure to let us know that something is swimming by quickly, which is mermaid-like but we never actually see the mermaid. This Russian mermaid seems to lean heavily on the siren lore, which is sometimes mixed in with mermaid lore as well. This mermaid, known as Lisa in her human form, appears to be landlocked to a lake, which I've never heard of before. She has a siren-like song that captivates Roma when he hears it. There is a backstory to why Lisa is looking for someone to love her. It is actually an interesting story that could be played out anywhere in the world. Since the movie is dubbed, with no option otherwise, I just had to go by what was being told to me. It would have made sense if Lisa was a mermaid that falls in love with a human man, but the characters in the film seem to think that she became a mermaid after her "death".
We do get to see Lisa transform into a mermaid slightly, with an evil almost fish-like face at one point. Her face also transforms into other people, which gave her more of a supernatural power than anything else. To add to that, Lisa can seemingly appear and disappear at will, bath water turns to blood for no reason and arms come out of the water even though there was no way for anyone else to be in the water without being seen. I think I would have liked the story for The Mermaid: Lake Of The Dead better if they had just said that Lisa is a ghost and left it at that. The pacing of the film feels a little off at times. It starts kind of slow and feels a little too fast by the time it is over. There were some things that I did like about the movie at least. The backstory was interesting and not all that long. It still managed to explain everything that was needed to know though. I also liked how the characters went about trying to beat the mermaid. Unlike most films where they research the problem, these characters went off trial and error pretty much.
There isn't a lot as far as special effects go. The morphing seemed to be the biggest effect and the film never really gets all that gory. What we do get was okay. I wasn't all that impressed by it, but it wasn't what I would call bad either. The acting was the same way. I did like the lead actors but I wasn't that impressed by them. I did like Sofia Shidlovskaya as the villain here fairly well at least.
There was a bit of a twist towards the end with Roma's sister. Even though Marina and her soon to be sister-in-law was working towards the same goal, trying to save Roma, they had different ideas on how to do that which ended up with a small twist in the story. It mixed things up a bit and I could honestly kind of see a family member doing that. I didn't hate The Mermaid: Lake Of The Dead but I really wish they had done more with mermaid lore. I don't know, maybe mermaids are said to be like this in Russia. I haven't bothered to look, though a friend of mine has told me that mermaids are considered to be evil there. I wouldn't encourage anyone to go find this movie, but if it looks like something you would like then I would say to go for it.
2 out of 5 At least it really was a Lake of the dead
