I Watch 'Em So You Don't Have To

SNOOZEFEST: THE FINAL CHAPTER




Lake Mungo (2008) Australia

While I was watching an unsurprisingly boring supernatural movie, I noticed one of the reviews acknowledged that yeah, that movie pretty much sucked so go watch Lake Mungo. I put it on my 'list of things to do if I'm desperate' and forgot about it. I wish I never remembered. This movie is basically about the family of a 16 year old girl named Alice who drowned (fictional I better point out) and their tribulations afterwards. Because they keep seeing her... up to a couple of years later.

The movie starts with an interview about the whys and wherefores. It's pretty straightforward: A family was on an outing at a dam when the brother and sister went swimming but only the brother came back. The search for the girl took over a week before they found her - the images they showed of her body were pretty, uh, yeah. 

When a body is underwater for say, 24 hours or more, it really doesn't look like the person it was. Trust me on this one and I'm not going to explain it. This picture may seem gross but... actually it's worse. Usually, especially if it has been several days, they don't make the loved ones do a visual identification - not only is it cruel to the family, it's not really possible. But of course the movie has its reasons as we find out later...

Because folks that's all this movie is. An interview with the family. That means you spend 87 minutes listening to the family recite the story in constant monotone with the interviewer asking questions, and very grainy, horrible video that may or may not show a teenage girl in the background. I mean where the hell did these cameras come from? The 70's? The images are so... awful that one could see anything in anything if that's what you wanted to see.

The only hint of originality in this film was the admission by the brother that he had faked the initial footage and pictures supposedly showing his dead sister. That was a plus. AND shows how easily those things CAN be faked - he explained the process and damn, it's just that easy. That was it though. We find that the girl was troubled (GASP - a 16 year old with problems?) and even was trapped in a sexual relationship with the neighbors - both at once. Ick. Very, very doubtful they'd let that get taped but they did and she had it hidden - which is why we get to see the boy's fake footage again 'cause they then see the shadow of their neighbor hiding in her closet, there hoping to find that tape. Duh.

The psychic the family had been consulting, apparently being the only one in the whole bloody country had also spoken with Alice. She said she had been having dreams of drowning for months. That would kind of tell me not to go swimming for a while. Actually that would tell me not to talk to a bloody psychic. Sigh.

So why did we have to see her drowned corpse? Footage from a school trip to Lake Mungo (movie's almost over and now we hear about it) shows her crying off in the distance (again the video was past awful) and burying something. The family goes there (this is a year or so later) and find the spot because hey, the movie's almost over. Alice had buried her cell phone and her favorite jewelry. 

And good on you Nokia, for showing a cell phone can be buried over a year and still work. They find footage on her cell phone (Again, extremely crappy, bad, bad Nokia!) that shows she had seen an apparition coming towards her - it was her bloated corpse (they think). Mystery solved. Alice was a psycho.

Just kidding - a little. We go through this pseudo mystery because Alice needed her family to know all these things so now they can live with the fact that not only did their beloved daughter drown, she was into kinky sex and was being haunted. How special.