Lake Mungo (2008)
Written and directed by Joel Anderson this is his second movie made in the horror genre, the first being "The Rotting Woman" released in 2002, which I had never heard of until now. After his 2008 release though of Lake Mungo if it's at all similar I'll be honest when I say I have no plans on going to seeing his previous works.
I'm going to start out by saying that I am biased against the majority of ghost films out there. It's become too trendy to film them in a documentary style (I understand budget concerns) but when you have film makers creating works such as Paranormal Activity and the lesser known but what should be just as popular "Evil Things" there isn't much of an excuse to go the documentary route and not try to make something simply amazing, or at least enjoyable.
Honestly if I wasn't folding laundry or sorting mail while watching the film I don't think I would have made it all the way through it. Hell any of the films in the Blair Witch franchise would prove to be a more entertaining watch.
We begin the movie with the focal point of the film - Alice, the main character, drowning. As time goes on the daughter’s picture starts to show up in the background in an increased amount of photographs and while the father and sister had both seen the body and knew it the daughter was actually dead the mother had not which was supposed to be what pushed her originally on the idea that maybe her daughter was still alive.
This is the part of the film that is trying to show the family slowly being haunted in an increased amount by the daughter. Her face showing up in pictures, the family looking increasingly disturbed, and a radio psychic from another country who never really says there is a ghost but is spoken with about the daughter on multiple occasions. I want to stress that this is the part of the film that is trying to show us that the family is being haunted because there never really is a haunting shown in any way, shape, or form past the photographs and eventually – a video.
You do learn a 'lot' about what was going on in the daughter's life as the film progresses which could have been a great way to make it a thriller. If it was done a little bit closer to the style of "The Lovely Bones" in how the plot was written (woman died, family finds out she was killed, and eventually who killers her) instead of a stab at a paranormal story it could have had more of a chance of working in my eyes. It even came close to it at points but with how it was clearly pushing the paranormal focus of the film over everything else. I'd love to blame this on being sick of paranormal movies but there were 2 I watched in the past year that really were entertaining and this one couldn't deliver the goods. It was going in too many directions at once instead of choosing a single route to follow.
