Take a Dip in “The Lake” on Blu-ray Home Video!

The small Thailand village of Bueng Kan becomes under siege by a monstrous being from out of the depths of near by lake.  Vicious and stealthy, the unknown creature terrorizes the wetland villagers town by town, killing all those in its rampaging path up an inlet river.  The local police commander and his two topnotch detectives are baffled and have no idea what they’re up against or how to exactly handle the situation but with the help of one of the bitten victims, psychically linked to the creature by its bite, the police and vigilant locals manage to capture the creature before it can wreak more havoc.  Concurrently, Police discover a large egg by the originating lake of first creature sightings and as they inspect it, the much larger mother beast emerges.  The mother searches out her children by using vocal sonar to track down her troubled little one, sending her galloping toward the panicky and crowded town in an unstoppable hunt that could lead to chaos and catastrophe. 

When the first news broke about “The Lake,” there was considerable positive buzz surrounding the big-budgeted, Thailand produced picture for it’s substantial, animatronic creature feature effects.  Yet, I purposefully held back doing any further research into learning more about the film that was released in the latter half of 2022 for reasons that may bias my professional opinion and to not spoil a virginal viewing experience of too much trailer audiovisual that can sometime reveal all the good bits and pieces of a movie.  Retrospectively, I’m starting to think that not absorbing much about the Lee Thongkham’s written-and-directed picture, whether by intentional research or by happenstance, was in due part to its unfavourability amongst global audiences despite the tangibly terrifying and impressive effects.  “The Lake” is produced by Nimit Sattayakul and Nathaporn Siriphakacharath with Dread Central’s production label, Epic Pictures, serving as coproduction company in conglomerate association with Hollywood Thailand, Airspeed Pictures, Five Stars Network, Right Beyond, Creative Motion, and the director’s own Thongkham Films.

“The Lake” is an ensemble cast of well-known Thai and Chinese based actors and actresses brought together to play a variety of characters caught up by a sudden and surprising monster attack.  The cast works well enough to supplement “The Lake’s” overall reactionary state of frantic and heavy browed emotions.  In fact, the performances are terribly melodramatic and only reactionary.  For a Kaiju film, there’s not a lot of chase sequences, monster versus man battling, or even mass destruction; instead, the direction is geared toward the emotional aftermath of experiences, such as watching the monster in terrifying awe, twisted faces of concern over the turmoil, or breaking down in a moment of loss, which graphic death scenes seem very sparse with only a few instances of the humanoid sized beast taking chest bites out of a few village denizens and the only principal character death.  The despairing cast is mostly comprised of Thai actors with a handful of Chinese actors sprinkled in, beginning with Thai leading man Thiraphat Sajakul (“The Maid”) as head inspector James (last names are nonexistent in the cast of characters).  Inspector James not only has to figure out how to outmaneuver the magnitude of the creature pool but also outthink the angsty games of his antagonistic teenage daughter Pam (Supansa Wedkama) who has squared off against him after the death of their mother.  That teeming with bitterness and frustration dynamic barely holds water as the problematic situation is over before it can even began to fester with audiences.  The emotional weight is definitely felt but the emotional worth retains little impact when lake monsters begin to emerge like Russian Matryoshka dolls, or nesting dolls, beginning with the smallest of the set first and working it’s to the larger mother.  “Motel Acacia” and “The Maestro:  A Symphony of Terror” actor Vithaya Pansringarm has a comparatively commanding presence as the Police Commander, but, to be honest, Pansringarm is consistently typecast as law authority throughout his career and has a firm foot on the role’s neck, but one of his subordinator officer is his daughter Fon (Palita Chueasawathee), a fact that we don’t really know until much, much later into the narrative, making the bond essentially not worth knowing, especially since nothing really happens with Fon other than the occasional exposition of events that can be easily interpreted with our own eyes.  Another pairing is wetland farmer Lin (Sushar Manaying) and her drunkard brother Keng (Thanachat Tunyachat, “Yuan ling 2”) who experience the initial attacks of the smaller creature and form a link to it once Keng survives a bite from its tentacle-dangling and squared-shaped jaws.  Like the other two couples, not much of arc is established, even for completion, as the pieces to their character composition feels fragmented and frail to the point of futility.  I was expecting Keng to play up his the drunk indolent and someone who takes for granted his hardworking sister and her daughter that the attack becomes this bonding moment of relationship redemption or salvation, but what unfolds on screen, between the two, harps Keng’s connection with the creature and nothing more.  Wanmai Chatborirak, Su Jack, Zang Jinsheng, and Amorntep Wisetsung round out the supporting cast.

Impressive as “The Lake” may be with the creature effects, using a near seamless blend of phenomenal computer generated imagery and the same animatronic technology as in “Jurassic Park” that brought life back from 65 million years of extinction with the T-Rex, a greater amount of depression mounds over the head of director Lee Thongkham like a black rain cloud.  “The Lake’s” creature derivativity, based off the “Jurassic Park,” “Godzilla,” and maybe even borrowing a trifle sum from “Cloverfield” in what is supposed to be a genetic combination of a crocodile, snake, and catfish(?), never weakens the narrative as audiences will always be curious to experience the larger-than-life animatronic head that miniaturizes the cast effectively.  Gen-pop will continue to gobble up a good-lookin’ monster on any day.  Where “The Lake” fatigues is with a poorly progressing script, flat characters, and misaligned directional continuity.  That latter is big – bigger than the monster itself – when one character with the camera perspective facing the framed character and the framed character begins looking slowly up to his right to eye-point the monster out and the next spliced in scene is facing the then camera perspective character from the right side and he also turns his head right to look at the monster.  They both turn their heads to the right, so which side is the monster on?  The same could be said about the omnipresent, big momma monster whose head is seemingly everything, everywhere all at once – by the sound of it, the creature should have starred in that famous multi-verse movie that won all those Academy Awards.  ‘The Lake” is drenched – excuse the pun – in overused scenes where a foreground man squares off against the blurred background monster as well as scenes of the ginormous, scaly head creeping in from either stage left or stage right to interact with the cast.  The moments lose their usually high and sizeable satisfaction rate with Thongkham’s repetitive saturation to create the first Thai, larger-than-life, monster movie because of his inability to showcase other scenes of Kaiju creature carnage.

“The Lake” arrives onto hi-def Blu-ray home video courtesy of Dread’s exclusive distribution label Epic Pictures.  The AVC encoded, 1080p, single layer Blu-ray is presented in the 1.77:1 widescreen aspect ratio, looking stunning and marvelous with the absent of natural lighting.  Most scenes are dark or overcast with rain, graded with a subtle increase of the cyan hue to reign with a ominous lurking in the dark fist.  The middle depth focus with streaking blur, like being concussed, runs as a shell-shocked induced motif throughout.  Thongkham plays with the blur feature a lot, switching back and forth between foreground and background as well as the centric focused blur with streaking.  Surprising, there are no issues with compression, despite the dark shoots against high and vibrant key lighting and the blur features which is well-sustained on the format disc.  The release comes with four dialogue tracks:  A Thai Dolby Digital 5.1, an English Dub Dolby Digital 5.1, a Thai Dolby Digital 2.0, and an English Dub Dolby Digital 2.0.  For about half the film, many of the scenes are done in the rain which don’t translate with vigor over the Thai 5.1, especially during the downpours.  Instead, “The Lake” is more focused on its epically scored soundtrack by composer Bruno Brugnano who has composed a string of horror of the last decade and half, including “The Coffin,” “She Devil”, and Thongkham’s “The Maid.”  Dialogue renders clean and clear with a fine simultaneous English subtitle, but the translation feels coarsely oversimplified to the point of covering just the basic generalities of plans, actions, and explanations, such as the environmental and global warming changes hinted earlier between the two Chinese scientists, that make the intellect of “The Lake” severely less than substantial.  The translated captions render the characters seemingly inexperienced on the simplest of tasks when I suspect that’s not entirely the case.  Spanish subtitles are also an available option.  Bonus features include a promotional behind-the-scenes advert, the official trailer, the Dread trailer, and a handful of raw deleted scenes that provide a better and extended insight into the ending rather than the wrap-it-up ending we’re left with in the final product. The physical attributes sport the monster in full roar bursting the surface of the lake on the front cover of the traditional Blu-ray snapper while the disc art plants a sandy monstrous footprint with the push lock right in the palm. There is no insert included. The region free release comes not rated and has a runtime of 93 minutes. Sold just on special effects alone, director Lee Thongkham rises the leviathan for Thailand’s movie industry, but “The Lake” is drained of box-office depth in every other element.

Take a Dip in “The Lake” on Blu-ray Home Video!