The Legend of Lake Hollow – review

Director: Chris Hollo

Release date: 2024

Contains spoilers

The wendigo is a strange creature to place under the vampire taxonomy, when it comes to film depictions, as it can sometimes be portrayed as an anthropomorphic monster that doesn’t quite fit in the genre and sometimes a more human like dead (or alive) thing. The eternal hunger it feels for human flesh helps push it that way, especially if it was once human. I have been criticised for featuring a wendigo film here before, and I do tend to look at these things on a case by case basis and, in this case, I felt there was enough to warrant a review.

arrival

The film starts with two friends, Dan (Kyle Rankin) and Carson (Brendan Bald) arriving at a cabin in the woods. As they approach the cabin a trail camera goes off (with a visible flash, which I understand is not how they work, as the flash would scare the animals). Inside, after a comment about finding the cabin in an advert provided by someone from Dan’s work, and whether Dan was using it as a work trip, Carson discovers that despite no Wi-Fi there was Bluetooth and it connects to the trail cam. He grabs the photo it took of them and then something blurry but uncanny from the night before.

Mark and Shay

Consideration of the picture is interrupted by the sound of a vehicle – probably Dan’s brother Mark (James David West). It is Mark but, rather than coming alone for the lad’s week away, he has his girlfriend Shay (Liz Atwater) with him and she has brought her best friend Laurie (Meg Barlowe). We discover that Mark disapproves of geologist Dan’s job – he works for a fracking company. There is a sub-plot that he has come partly to run some exploratory tests but, despite being mentioned by the wendigo (Micah Oser) later, it is so low key dealt with it really doesn’t add much of an environmental thread.

Meg Barlowe as Laurie

Having met the creepy caretaker, Al (Will Waldron), the weirdness in the night is Mark awaking to the sounds of sex and seeing the flash of the trail cam go off. He goes out to check it (of course the Bluetooth signal reaches the cabin) and sees figures in the water who then vanish. The next day he and Laurie go to find Al’s cabin, while the others check trail cams and look around. They don’t find Al but find his injured grandson Grady (Austin Copps) who says that he needs to get away and that *they* normally leave them alone and suggests he was attacked and his grandfather was taken by the lake folk. They get him back to their cabin but their vehicles have been pushed into the lake and the landline malfunctions (Mark can hear 911, they can’t hear him and then it goes dead).

lake folk

Of course, the true enemy is a wendigo. The lake folk seem to be ghosts but do appear to be semi-corporeal. The wendigo can shapeshift into any victim and so most of the kills are offscreen so the viewer is left guessing whether a person is real or the monster, but the film doesn’t capitalise on the sense of paranoia that should create. The cabin (which is very modern, given it is a lure for food) has wendigo carved above the door, which is a bit of a giveaway. The film uses a plot device lifted from Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island with regards the lake people.

true form on camera

The cameras were placed there by wendigo hunters and were blessed, so it can’t remove them, and the camera captures its true form. Whilst it appears to be the deer skulled version at first, that is just a mask and it is a cadaveric human, who has been there centuries and who, in the form of a beautiful woman, married the cabin builder in 1880 and then ate him over the winter and now rents it out when hungry (and had it fitted with electricity etc). So it is an eternal, shapeshifting (but dead looking) cannibal and I think that is enough to class it as a vampire.

wendigo unmasked

The acting is ok, and rather it is the script that fails to generate the tension and also assigns strange character reactions – especially from Laurie who falls for Grady instantly and mostly overlooks any weirdness around him. The fact they can’t get help leads to consideration of hiking out of there. But the 25 miles will take 2 days and so it’s dismissed… except it is 25 miles following the road they drove in on and they could surely cover that off in a day, if they wanted (and would soon be well away from the lake). As I mentioned, the environmental thread is underexplored. I’m going for 3.5 out of 10. It feels a tad churlish but 4 just seemed too generous and the biggest issue is that it fails to be a horror (the ghosts don’t particularly spook and the kills are off screen) but doesn’t hold enough tension as a thriller.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK