Every now and then, a cheesy low-budget riff on a man vs. nature story worms its way into hearts. Sharknado catapulted to prominence three years ago (and spawned two lesser sequels) thanks to its shameless absurdity. Meanwhile, Birdemic has carved out a cult following due to Ed Wood levels of passion-fueled incompetence. But for every entry that burrows in between those two poles on the so-bad-it’s-good spectrum, there are a seemingly infinite number of other cheapies that miss the mark entirely and plummet into the schlock abyss. Made-for-TV movie Blood Lake: Attack of the Killer Lampreys falls into the latter camp.
In airing their first-ever horror film, Animal Planet clearly hoped that this creature feature (also produced via direct-to-video factory The Asylum) would do for them what Sharknado did for the Syfy channel. Blood Lake tries to tick the same boxes, including casting a “90210” alum of their own—here a grossed-out Shannen Doherty in place of an un-chompable Ian Ziering. And what better way to ride on Sharknado’s coattails than with a flurry of creepy fish that can literally hitch rides on the tails of sharks!
If you feel like you haven’t heard the word “lamprey” enough lately, you’re in luck, because Blood Lake does its best to give you a lifetime supply of the word in one sitting. If you made its specific mention of “lamprey” into a drinking game, you’d pass out in your own vomit long before the squirming buggers even start coming up through the plumbing. In case you’re unfamiliar with the creature, a lamprey is an eel-like, occasionally parasitic fish equipped with a sucker mouth that looks (as Doherty’s character so charmingly puts it) like an “anus with teeth.” The real-life fish is already considered an invasive species, but when the Blood Lake version overbreeds to the point of devouring all other nearby fish, they next develop a hankering for human orifices.
With Blood Lake centered on dreadfully fake-looking killer eel-fish, the plot is beside the point. Still, Doherty seems game enough early on. She plays Cate, the mother of an eye-rolling teenage daughter and precocious younger son. But despite top billing, she’s offscreen for a good chunk of the film’s first half, and this story really hinges on Cate’s husband, Michael (Jason Brooks), a Fish and Wildlife specialist who is called into town to deal with the pesky lamprey overpopulation. He knowingly spouts whoppers like “A desperate lamprey is a dangerous lamprey,” despite the fact that freshwater lampreys are usually non-parasitic. He’s the only one who truly begins to see the writing on the wall—in this case the wall being a dam that the jawless fish have learned to scale with their mouths. Working side-by-side with Scut Farkus from A Christmas Story (Zack Ward), shit gets real for Michael when their cheeseball colleague (Fred Stoller) stops dropping lines like “I love the smell of lampricide in the morning” and turns up at the morgue covered in hickeys. One poorly-executed “chestburster scene” knockoff later and the lampreys have wriggled into the plumbing.
Taking a page from Jaws (as every subsequent aquatic predator film, by rule, must), Blood Lake uses a greedy mayor played by Christopher Lloyd to stand in the way of Michael’s attempts at evacuation. After all, what are a few mutilated corpses when there’s big tourist money to be had in a small Michigan town with a moderately-sized lake? Lloyd’s mayor gets what’s coming to him before too long, though, as he learns the hard way that the orifice-hungry killer fish can swarm up through the toilet. (But before you feel too bad that Doc Brown is now reduced to taking CGI fish up the pooper, don’t forget that even in his prime Lloyd wasn’t opposed to being force-fed baked beans by Dennis the Menace and farting into a campfire.)
This all sounds like a recipe for goofy creature fun. But like so many other cheesy horror B-movies, Blood Lake flounders. What makes aquatic predators so terrifying is that they lurk unseen in an environment where they have all the physical advantages. Blood Lake can’t stop showing us the lampreys in all their cartoonish CGI glory. A few poor chumps die in the water, but most of the mayhem inexplicably takes place on land, as the lampreys wiggle around like the alien grubs in Slither. The director throws in corny, “Full House”-style family drama and shallow teenage romance (all awkwardly acted and evidently written by someone with the mind of a 15-year-old) to pad out the runtime. But that’s almost preferable to the half-assed CGI. In murky river water, a rubber snake on a string would be far more realistic than the brightly-lit, computerized lampreys that appear to exist in another plane of existence than the live action. And once the lampreys literally become fish out of water, you’d think the humans would have the upper hand, yet it takes until the third act before anyone even bothers to try smacking them with something.
Worst of all, there’s some doozies in the script that are completely mishandled. Lines like “You’ll see the lampreys before they see you” and “I’ve got a hickey on the back of my neck that says otherwise” are humorlessly delivered without either irony or conviction. The film isn’t self-aware enough to be considered camp, yet it doesn’t put in enough effort to turn out hilariously earnest. Even Doherty phones it in by the end, in one instance warning her children about the killer lampreys behind them as though she was recommending against a dinner menu selection. The only ironic thing about this 2014 film is that it just happened to be released around the same time that Flint, Michigan first began pumping poisonous local water through its taps, water that the former Flint mayor insisted was safe. Now that’s a mayor who deserves to sit on a lamprey-teeming toilet if there ever was one.