Three Films Make A Post: Some directors live for their work. He kills for it.

Return to Cabin by the Lake (2001): Because apparently nobody in the early 00’s could get enough of Judd Nelson mugging idiotically through a nonsense plot that tries to excuse its stupidity by calling itself a comedy, the world suffered this sequel to Po-Chih Leong’s TV movie Cabin by the Lake. The film’s still plotted for an audience of fools, the jokes are the sort of smug “ain’t Hollywood horrible” jokes that must have had a beard in the 1930s already, and Nelson’s performance as serial killer/screenwriter/director is so broad, no bridge could cross it. Though you gotta give some respect to screenwriter Jeffrey Reddick when an early, completely insufferable, victim of Nelson’s Stanley goes by his own name; I accept the apology.

The Droving (2020): This piece of British indie folk horror about a soldier/torturer (Daniel Oldroyd) searching for the killer of his sister (Amy Tyger) as directed by George Popov is fortunately not trying to be funny. It’s a bit of a frustrating film, though, the sort of affair that’s clearly made with talent and love but doesn’t come together quite well enough. The film certainly has an eye for moody (and pretty) landscape shots very useful for folk horror, and its script has a clear idea of the intersection between its folkloric idea and the inner life of its main character. The acting’s good too.

The problem is the pacing: scenes, as is so often the case in indie productions, tend to go on longer than they should be – sometimes clearly aiming for suspense but not quite being able to sustain it long enough, other times going slightly overboard with an attempt to deepen the character and his flashback relation to his sister. Of course, these are the kinds of flaws that come from a willingness to take risks and show the right kind of ambition, so it’s difficult to be too unhappy with the film.

She Never Died (2019): Speaking of indie movies with ambition, Audrey Cummings’s peculiar mix of grungy proto-superhero elements and horror, with a smidgen of 80s buddy comedy certainly is that, also. Canadian and city-based, this also shows an understanding of creating mood via landscape, or rather cityscape. Otherwise, there’s little connecting it with any of the other films in this post. It’s one of those films that have a peculiar and personal vibe, as if you were watching someone’s very individual favourite bits of different genres put together to form one movie. As is typical for this sort of affair, this isn’t always as effective as it could be on a dramatic level, but still features nice effects, fun performances by lead Olunike Adeliyi as our superpowered cannibal heroine with a secret and various Canadian character actors like Peter MacNeill and Noah Denby, and a visible love for the city as the true place to set one’s grubby vigilantism in.


The only truly off-putting element here is the sudden excursion into the biblical in the final ten minutes or so, promising a sequel I suspect will never come instead of finishing the film properly.

In short: Cabin by the Lake (2000)

Screenwriter Stanley Caldwell (Judd Nelson) is taking his research very seriously indeed. To wit, tasked with writing about a serial killer who drowns women and creates a – pretty tacky looking – underwater garden out of their corpses, he has started kidnapping young women in LA, holding them imprisoned in the lake side hut he lives in, and indeed eventually drowns and tackily gardens them.

Things have been going well for Stanley until now, for Boone (Michael Weatherly), the only policeman in the area who is ever doing anything at all, is a pretty idiot, and people seem to think Judd Nelson’s eye bugging and grimacing is totally normal. The situation changes when Stanley’s newest victim, Kimberley Parsons (Daniella Evangelista), turns out to be rather tough to drown. She survives his attempt at killing her without him noticing (and despite suffering from hydrophobia), and makes her way to the local police. But how can an idiot like Boone catch a serial killer? Calling in actual cops would be right out, so he and Kimberley enlist a local troupe of special effects people to create a fake Kimberley corpse with a camera eye to catch the killer in the act of gardening.

And that’s obviously where Davis Stephens’s script for Po-Chih Leong’s USA Network TV movie loses it completely, stumbling from one stupid idea to the next, shifting tone without rhyme or reason and ending on a deeply unsatisfying climax that even feels the need to have Kimberley re-caught by Stanley to come up with anything dramatic at all.


It’s a bit of a shame, too, for there’s material for either a dark satire about classic Hollywood personality types and their closeness to serial killers in the movie, or for a tight horror thriller about a woman who grows into her own fighting off a serial killer. The film’s problem is that it seems unable to decide which one of these movies it wants to be, and clearly doesn’t find a tone to connect these rather different impulses. So it presents wild mood swings between broad black comedy, TV thriller, and something that’s probably meant to be darkly poetic horror, as if the viewer were zapping around between very different channels.