LAKE MUNGO Review
Found footage horror movies are a tricky act to land. When not having to worry about making sure the film somehow maintains a sense of “realism” to it, they must also contend with actually delivering the horrors that are promised within the genre. Indeed, most found footage horror movies, from THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT to PARANORMAL ACTIVITY thrive in the art of the slow burn, slowly trickling out the horrors in bursts as they build up to some inevitable shocking climax. However, LAKE MUNGO, from director/writer Joel Anderson emphasizes the slow and eschews the burn in a resulting found footage horror film that demonstrates little to be afraid of.
Truth be told, slapping the “found footage horror” moniker on this little film would be a sort of mislabel as LAKE MUNGO operates moreso as a fictional documentary/drama with horrific elements that occasionally pop their head in. The “documentary” concerns the troubling case of Alice Palmer (Talia Zucker): a teenage girl whose disappearance quickly transforms into tragedy after an outing at the local lake with her family. Reeling from their loss, the Palmer family, particularly matriarch June (Rosie Traynor), begin to feel that Alice may somehow still be out there as something begins to make its presence known within the family home, with doors opening and closing without explanation and shadowy figures running in and out of frame on the family’s camcorder set up by Alice’s brother Matthew (Martin Sharpe). As the events unfold throughout its sub 90 minute runtime, the film begins to shift from one genre to another, moving from sequences of “found footage horror” to “realistic family drama” in ways that don’t fail to mesh seamlessly.
Despite an appreciably short runtime, Anderson manages to make his lithe film feel slow, slow, slow. In a way, this is a testament to the film’s visual look as it actually looks like a local Australian documentary about a girl’s tragic death. From blandly lit talking head segments to the charming utilization and creation of authentic “home movies” from the family to even the believable performances of the family members, LAKE MUNGO should get credit for, at least for the first 20 minutes or so, feeling “real”. It’s everything that comes after those 20 minutes where the film begins to show some noticeable flaws, the most visible of which being the the fact that the film isn’t really scary or all that interesting. In regards to both the horror and the reveals of what exactly is happening to the Palmer family, Anderson struggles to find anything new or unique to display relying on the usual muffled sounds of doors closing or slow moving shadows appearing in the background of photos or videos. While most of the horror scenes (outside of one admittedly well done reveal near the film’s climax) fail to bring originality or scares to the proceedings, it’s Anderson’s telling of Alice Palmer’s story that sink the film.
Where the director/writer could have approached the sad story of a lonely teenage girl with restraint and care, Anderson instead opts to throw in plot reveals that feel needlessly dark and perverted. By doing this, LAKE MUNGO shifts from an uneventful ghost film into some kind of dour teenage drama that also tries to provide a portrait of a family coming to terms with their grief. The latter portion, a family dealing with grief, provides glimmers of something interesting that Anderson can latch onto as he has some solid performers on hand that dutifully try to express their own coping methods, however he decides to combine all three mentioned elements into a film that fails to deliver any sense of dread or emotional catharsis.
When all is said and done, LAKE MUNGO is simply boring and for any horror related film, that’s almost always a death blow. Sure, it has moments that deliver scares and some emotional resonance but those moments are suffocated by even longer sequences of unoriginal ghost activity and exaggerated drama. For the Palmer family the scariest thing that could happen to them isn’t the fact that their daughter may be haunting their house, it’s the possibility that they might be trapped in a horror film that is so dull.
1.5/5
