Starring: Fay Masterson, William Gregory Lee, Sandrine Holt
Written & Directed By: Andrew C. Erin
Release: 2005
Grade: C+

Sam’s Lake begins with a generic camping trip scenario, but makes a complete transition in the story through the reveal of a murderer in their midst. As it goes in to the mindset of the murderer, the film takes a step away from what we expect and hits on some powerful questioning of whether killing those around is the only way to keep them close. Sam’s Lake’s main flaw is that it takes it’s time as a very simple movie and in the last act introduces so many new theories that several of them discredit the others.

Sam (Masterson) is taking a group of her friends with her to go camping where she grew up. Both of her parents are dead now and she sees this trip as a chance to become closer with their spirits as well as her new family. Several of them have been coping with loss and other things that were going on in their lives and they are looking forward to a change of pace. When they get to camp, they tell a number of ghost stories around the campfire to try to spook each other a bit. Sam tells a story about a man who lived in the very woods they are sitting in. He had a mental disability and was neglected as a child. At a certain point his parents just stopped trying to deal with him. He knew that they didn’t really love him and he couldn’t stand being around them any longer.

So he left home and lived in the woods among the animals who he claimed talked to him, unlike the humans. He killed his parents since they couldn’t love him and had a family of his own that could. He had twins and as they grew he played morbid games with them and the neighborhood children.This story creeps everyone out a bit, but it becomes much more real when they find his journal. They are disgusted by what they read and just want to forget about this man. However, pretty soon the killer unveils the hidden identity and begins taking the lives of the campers. Pretty soon few of them are left alive. The one that is left’s only chance of survival is joining the killer’s warped murderous lifestyle.

The cast was pretty decent, there weren’t any amazing performances, but they all did the job. William Gregory Lee stood out the most as one of the locals. He did some great exploration with conflicting idea that clearly were very traumatizing to his character. Fay Masterson did pretty well as Sam, our protagonist. She had a literally down to earth quality about her. Her character was very connected with nature and felt links to dead spirits. She was a likeable, yet vulnerable character and also helped set up the tone for the horror elements in the film. Sandrine Holt did well as the last victim standing and was likeable enough that part of you wants to see her live, even in a twisted life. However, she isn’t developed all that much, so a bigger part of us is fine with seeing her bloodshed. No one else is really worth mentioning, but they give us realistic enough characters rather than simply someone just around to die in the near future.

Even the more generic moments of Sam’s Lake are pretty well done. The characters seemed real and I cared for them to extent, some more than others though. We weren’t given very many clichés even though the set up did feel pretty familiar. The legend/back story took me by surprise since it wasn’t the direction I expected it to go. I really liked how it brought a vulnerability to the killer while still depicting him as a monster. His murderous actions can clearly be traced back to the lack of acceptance he got from his family. The idea of family is played with a lot in the film overall. These group of friends have all had bad home lives or struggles, where they didn’t really have parents that were there for them. So they all became each other’s family. The whole reason why our killer does what he does, is from this same absence of parental figures in his life. You could argue that the victims had the same potential to be just as the killer is and one is even given the chance to do this. Being betrayed in the past, the murderer gets back at those who he wasn’t good enough for and raises his own family on his own outlooks on life and death. The theory of killing so people close to you so they physically can never leave you is creepy and very intriguing. There seems to be an overpowering need to control those around you, even if they are people you care about. The killer is given many layers just with what we know before we really even know who it is. Actually, a more interesting movie would have been this guy’s rejection and the formation of him becoming a killer. I can just imagine scenes composed of killing kids with ones own kids and teaching them that killing can actually be a caring gesture.