Fever Lake (1997)

I honestly hate rating any movie the dreaded 1/10. In some respects, giving a 1/10 to a bad movie is taking the easy way out. I do my very best to find something positive to say. As hard as I try, I can't do that with Fever Lake. The only glimmer of anything remotely positive I can come up with is the marginally decent acting on the part of Lauren Parker. But she's not good enough to raise the rating. Overall, Fever Lake is a dull, lifeless, mess of a movie. I have a hard time understanding why it was even made. There is absolutely no reason to watch this disaster.So, what makes Fever Lake so bad? Acting – Horrible. Mario Lopez never could act and Corey Haim gives the laziest performance I think I've ever seen. Plot – Unoriginal. Gee, a group of college age kids heads off to a house on a lake – wonder what's going to happen? Direction – Uninspired. Ralph Portillo brings nothing new to the genre. Special effects – Lame. It's easy to see there was no budget for Fever Lake. Music – Annoying. Whoever wrote the score should be taken out and shot. Treatment of Native Americans – Insulting. Not only does a white dude play the part of Clear Springs, he does so in a ridiculously stereotypical stilted speech pattern. Sets and costuming – Unremarkable. The whole things looks like it might have been filmed in my neighbor's house with the clothes found in their closet. Characters – Stupid. These are some of the most idiotic people put on film. This list could go on and on. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. Again, as much as I hate doing it, I cannot in good conscience rate Fever Lake anything but a 1/10.

This is one of those terrible movies that is really good for the guys at RiffTrax to skewer. In my opinion there is still a lot of mileage to be gotten out of "teens in the woods encounter evil possessed killer" plots. But this thing is just such a mess! Other people have blamed the actors, the costumer, the director, the scriptwriter. I'll take a new approach and blame the editor. I see an outside possibility that the script was coherent, but that the editor rendered it into an incoherent mess.The truth is, after watching the riffed version five times, I still don't quite understand what was going on in the movie. The "rules" of fantasy and horror don't need to make real-world sense, but these rules have to be explained clearly, and then stuck to, and make internal sense. The filmmakers failed at all this.There is a lot to laugh at here. The wolf attack that did not include a wolf, the terrible acting of the "novelist," the assumption that college students play a lot of hide and seek and truth or dare still, the non- Indian, and everyone mispronouncing the word "wolf."Poor Corey Haim. Being molested as a kid actor by producers, his drug addiction, and this movie. There must be a special place in the afterlife for someone who suffered that much.

I am not a movie snob - I am always on the lookout for low budget indie gems that are well made for their budget and talent pool.This is not one of them.I watched this because I like Corey Haim. I wanted to like this movie because he was in it. But I can't. I just can't. This movie is so bad, I don't think putting all my favorite actors in it would have made a difference.Corey Haim, Mario Lopez, and Lauren Parker were the only ones who seemed to know how to act. Everyone else seemed wooden and out of place. When a dangerous moment was supposed to be happening, everyone ran like they were out on a leisurely Sunday jog. The pacing of the story can be described the same way, which made me keep checking the time to see how much I had left. There is literally nothing redeemable about this movie. Nothing in the script is written very well. Not the characters, not the plot, absolutely nothing. The only back story that exists is with one of the main characters, and it's the one you can tell from the beginning who the perp is going to end up being. They give it all away from the start. There is no real mystery or reason for the audience to engage with the story at all.It's a completely pointless slasher flick. But wait! Aren't there a lot of pointless slasher flicks that are still entertaining? Sure there are - and compared to this movie, they are Oscar winners.I don't have a problem with movies that employ a lot of ambiance. This is one example where manufacturing ambiance doesn't do any justice whatsoever. There is zero skill in camera angles. Even the music is awful. The costumes would make K-Mart designers go on prozac. It's like they went to a church bazaar, bought a mystery box and dressed themselves blindfolded. I know it's 1996, but even by 1996 standards they were dressed pretty horribly. There's a lot of reviewers that believe this movie must have been made in the early 1980s, THAT IS HOW BAD THEY ARE DRESSED. This movie is a total waste. It's a waste of time, a waste of celluloid, a waste of bandwidth, and it's even a waste to have a profile dedicated to this movie on IMDb. It's a waste of an hour and a half of your life. RIP Corey Haim - even you couldn't save this piece of crap movie.

fever isa movie which was on TV the other night at about 3am. After watching this unsuspenseful movie I guessed at what rating it would get. This movie could have been good as the story in general is OK. The actors lines are cheesy and stupid. They make you feel like laughing. Also the makeup could have been a lot better as it looks fake. In one of the scenes their is an attack by a wolf and I don't know if you weren't supposed to see the wolf or what. The actiong was poor as well as they should have casted a real native American instead of a poor look alike. Although I believe this movie to be very poor and the acting to be acceptable but I kinda like it in a strange way. Thats why I feel it could have been made a lot better with a much bigger budget.