Film Review by Jay Michaels
Independent horror films are always good and bad. The storyline, the risks-taking, the creativity, the ideas, concepts, even dialogue and casting are always something to capture out attention. Sadly, a usual lack of money or time or both makes the film a bit bumpy in terms of editing or sound or lighting or maybe a scene or two is not there that should be as the money ran out or the actor got another gig.
But sometimes a film comes along that transcends its station as an indie and creates a complete movie going experience.
Lake Artifact is that film.
A brilliant concept, excellent acting, fine filmmaking and production values and all scene present-and-accounted-for.
Director/screenwriter Bruce Wemple hands us the customary horror film set-up. Five friends go on a weekend getaway to a cabin in the woods. Then all hell breaks loose. But here is where his imagination takes hold beautifully. It is not a monster that hunts the five campers but they themselves … at another time … before … after … during …
Here is where horror and sci-fi stalk the quartet as the cabin is built on a crossroad of time and space with a set of rules that they must obey to stay alive, making them killers of each other … and themselves.
Told in flashbacks and futurist moments (of course), A tight ensemble of actors – Sheila Ball, Thomas Brazzle, Adrian Burke, Chris Cimperman, Catharine Daddario, Dylan Grunn, Ben Hauck, Rick Montgomery, Jr., John Willoughby Noble, Grant Schumacher, and Anna Shields – weave an engrossing story that vacillates between high science fiction and dark horror, sometimes in the span of a single line. Clever character traits (an out-of-work actor, a drunken historian, a tiny love triangle that explains something over an hour later, the overt sexual behavior of a character) make the plot that much more engrossing as well as sumptuous spice in the meal that is the movie.
Wemple, whose name appears next to every credit section of the film, has given us a thoroughly enjoyable and deep-enough-to-analyze movie. Here’s to seeing his name next to every credit on a lot more films.
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