In short: The Lake (2022)

A huge – or not quite so huge - reptilian (amphibian?) creature emerges from a lake to terrorize a small community of farmers. Might there just possibly a connection to the strange, large egg a child has found and is now carrying around with her?

Quickly, the villagers escape to the nearest town, but it too is soon attacked by one or several monsters. The authorities, our main farmers, a cop with a dead wife and an estranged teen daughter, and two Chinese scientists who pop in irregularly in a way that suggests the film is earning some Chinese production money with them, and the town’s population run around like chicken with their heads cut off. For reasons that will only become vaguely clear later on, at least one of the characters has an empathic connection to one of the monsters.

After a strong and moody beginning that suggests this to be a competently made, traditional monster movie which wants its kaiju cake but also its man-sized monster ice cream, Lee Thongkham’s The Lake breaks down completely. There’s no sense of progression to the plot, and the editing and writing is so unclear, you’re often not even sure which of the numerous characters is actually in a scene with whom, who is at the other end of town. Often, it is even unclear how big the monster carnage is actually supposed to be.

To make matters even less engaging, the film rips off whole scenes (even including camera positioning) from films like Jurassic Park and The Host, but without anchoring them in its own narrative (such as it is) at all. It ignores the weaknesses of its special effects and often appears to go out of its way to point their flaws out, making them look much worse than they actually need to be. If you told me there wasn’t a professional editor involved in this mess at all, I’d straight up believe you.

It’s a bit of a shame, too, for the film appears to have a decent enough budget; there just doesn’t seem to have been anybody involved in its production able to make good use of it.