Skeleton Lake (2012) Reviews

• A Canadian Review of a Canadian Indie Flick...

  visijared2011-09-03

  Like so many movies coming out these days, this film starts off strong... but ends up flat. A group of pro criminals on the run after a big score pick the wrong place to low law. OK, its been done.. but not for a while, and it could have been a fresh take on the story. The characters are developed, and by the midway mark you can see and understand the different personality conflicts and connections, despite all the black sunshades, grunts and head bobs cinema gangsters are for some reason restricted to communicating with. But regardless the movie sets itself up as an exciting and promising thrill ride. However halfway through you realize the concept is flawed. By the time the bodies start to pile up, you realize you're not in for a ride but a slow crawl to a sad finish. The movie tries to become something its not, by adding old, typical action movie one-liners and having an ending with absolutely no twist at all (whoever says there's a twist ending must have watched another movie). The subplots finish at dead ends and the characters degrade into voiceless masses. The action is over the top and corny by the end. "And it started off so well", you will say to yourself... I'm a Canadian who loves and wants Canadian film to progress, but we're not going to do it with movies like these. Please, please, please... remember movies need endings too!

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• Average backwoods survival horror.

  poolandrews2012-05-08

  Battleground starts as six armed thieves make their getaway from a bungled bank robbery in an ambulance, having shot two cop's dead at the crime scene they are in a desperate hurry to get out of the country & Mitch (Bryan Larkin) calls in a favour to get himself & his men flown out of the US but they will have to wait for twelve hours. The gang decide to head into an isolated forest to wait & try to avoid capture but during the night their van mysterious disappears, with over three million dollars & a long way to go they agree to walk & steal a car on the way but they are not alone in the forest as a deranged Vietnam veteran (Hugh Lambe) begins to kill the men one at a time using traps & his own sniper rifle. The gang of thieves quickly realise they are being hunted & must find a way to turn the tables or all end up dead & you can't spend three million dollars if your dead, can you? Originally called Skeleton Lake (which is odd since there's no lake in it much less one called Skeleton lake...) this Canadian production was co-written & directed by Neil Mackay & while it's nothing special it's watchable enough in a routine competent sort of way, I've seen a lot better but then I've also seen a lot worse. What we have here is your typical backwoods survival film where some random character's are chased & killed in some remote forest somewhere, we've seen the setting before, we've seen the group of desperate men on the run after a robbery gone wrong before too & if I'm not very much mistaken we have also seen the deranged Vietnam Veteran who goes psycho before as well. As I said Battleground is nothing new & it's fairly predictable too with the only surprises of any note being how each victim is killed. The killer is given no motivation whatsoever other than he served in Vietnam, none of the character's have any real personality & are merely there to make the numbers up & get killed. At just over 80 minutes long Battleground moves along at a decent pace I suppose & it competent for what it is so as long as you don't expect too much you could do a lot worse than this. Unfortunately too much of Battleground is nothing more than the various character's running around a forest, there are a couple of minor shoot-outs but not much action. While there's not much gore there is one sequence which is quite nasty & almost at odds with the rest of the film, the Vietnam nutter cuts a guy's head off, pokes his eyeball out with a scalpel, proceeds to slice his face & scalp off to leave the fleshless skull before putting the guy's skinned face mask on the table next to the skull. It's a nasty scene which as I said is removed from anything else in the film which is otherwise fairly tame with nothing more than a few gunshot wounds & blood splatter. Shot in Ontario in Canada this is surprisingly well made with no hand-held jerky photography or quick machine gun editing so I have to give it some credit for that at least, are filmmakers finally realising these two annoying techniques are universally disliked? By me anyway. The acting isn't up to much, end of story. Battleground isn't a terrible film it's just that it's not a very good one either, it's a competent horror thriller that you will watch & probably have forgotten about within a couple of days. It could have been better but it could have been so much worse too.

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• Hunter vs. killers inde crime/action/thriller that kept me guessing.

  myloveincruz2011-08-28

  I believe this is the first positive review I've been motivated to write. I am doing so because there are no other reviews and this low budget flick deserves attention. I'd say it's a clever predator vs. the well-armed and ruthless protagonists, rather than the serial killer vs. the kids camping in the woods kind of movie and it does that well, so if you like that kind of thing, you'll dig it. I'm personally more into brain candy but this was an enjoyable ride. I'm not a big fan of this kind of premise but this has good writing so it's different with writing, directing, acting, camera work and not the usual number and quality of suspension of disbelief moments that have me bitching at the screen. The beginning drew me in and since the story kept me guessing while I tried to figure out the characters. I surprised myself when I realized I was actually into it. I see Neil MacKay directed and wrote with Sean McAulay and IMDb has this as Neil's first film, so bravo! I expect this is going to get attention and you'll get money to spend on your next project and hopefully my high expectations for you will prove justified. Not greatly challenging rolls for the actors but they did good jobs and I saw a promising spark in a few of them. I have criticisms about realism but they are spoilers and gee, this isn't a biography or a documentary, ha. Also, it had a bit of humor to it, which is always a welcome relief for me, after relentless brutality. Gosh, I went on too long. Loved the cigar lighting scene, you'll know which one I mean, had me grinning. Gosh, that was a lot of praise, hmm, now I feel I deserve a share of that, what was it? 3.2 Million, from the bank heist. Oh well, I got on a roll so I'll count it as a good deed.

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• A toothless, limp, slimy predator.

  spoonholio-837-961512012-06-13

  I'm going to keep this very simple. Imagine you have never had a creative idea in your life, so you watch Predator and decide it's so awesome you're going to remake it, except you don't have a monster, a jungle, special effects, actors, soldiers or talent. This is what Battleground is, a poorly hacked together rip off of Predator (with a bit of Hobo with a Shotgun). Scene for scene, line for line, Battleground tries to wear Predator's shoes and what is baffling to me is how so many people involved in the making of this film could have gone along with it. Was this really how the director wanted it? And they actually spent money to make this? Congratualtions, you've made it that much harder for real film makers to get funding.

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• Interesting concept.

  rawiri422012-06-11

  Battleground is a movie that has been done before. The only thing is that each of its elements were in different movies (for example: Predator - except that the predator in that was a science-fiction alien and in this he's real)! Basically whilst certainly not a great film of the genre, Battleground is worth the time taken to watch it. Unfortunately, the director fell into the same trap that so many others have succumbed to whereby there is a scene where the predator runs away from three heavily-armed men through the forest. All three are letting loose with machine guns (at least one with one in each hand!) and yet the only person who gets anything like a hit is the cameraman who manages at least three seconds of a clear shot of the fleeing man's back whilst the three pursuers cant even scratch him! As I say, this is nothing new, It happened in several Arnold Scwartzenegger films where several good guys (or vice versa) fire several hundred rounds at the fleeing bad guy (or vice versa) and yet the bad guy, with only a hand gun manages to take out more than one of them over his shoulder. It insults the viewers' intelligence and, in my case anyway, cost some points in my rating of the movie. Other than that though, Battleground is definitely a thriller - although, with just a couple of brief exceptions, not really a horror film - and, as I say, worth the time.

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