BLOOD LAKE

This is the surprisingly touching and inspirational -- but also violent and gory -- tale of an immigrant family succeeding against all odds in a new place.  Blood Lake was released in 2014, and features Shannon Doherty, Zack Ward, Christopher Lloyd and Susie Abromeit in the Naked Ape roles.  I say the good qualities of this film are "surprising" because all the starring roles are occupied by Shaved Monkeys trying to commit genocide against the heroes of the piece -- not one of which was played by a real Sea Lamprey. 

Remember A Majority Of One, with the Japanese lead character played by Alec Guinness in eye makeup and black shoe polish on his hair?  Remember when Boris Karloff painted his face and hands brown and put on a turban to play the evil Swami in Abbott and Costello Meet The Killer?  Remember how the only Arab they could find to play Ahmed ibn Fadlan in The Thirteenth Warrior was Antonio Banderas, who never even tried to hide his Spanish accent?  This is one of those movies.   Every member of the plucky immigrant family you'll see in this picture is either a rubber prop or a computer-generated cartoon.  But believe it or not, you'll come out of it loving every one of them, maybe more than you loved Bruce, the (fiberglass!) Great White recruiter in Jaws.  Loving the rubber Lampreys is the biggest surprise in a cavalcade of surprises you'll come across in this picture.

PLOT SUMMARY:  This story takes place in Charlevoix, Michigan -- a Charlevoix filled with distinctly subtropical trees, and houses unlike anything seen in Upper Lower Michigan, with moon doors and fancy-ass custom masonry, the yellow sandstone clearly chosen to match the desert that doubtless really surrounds the California neighborhood where they filmed this movie.  There's also an initial flyover shot of what looks more to me like the Amazon River than any Great Lakes waterway.   

I'm not going to confuse you with the names of the Naked Ape characters; they call each other things like Michael, Kate and Bob and they all act pretty much the same.  It makes more sense to describe them by the stock roles they play.  They all hate the Lampreys, and anyone seen as insufficiently terrified by the menace is a BLAMED FOOL.  As the opening scenes unwind before us, every good, wholesome fish in Lake Charlevoix is sucked dry and the wretched Lampreys are SCALING THE DAM to try to make their way into Lake Michigan!  WILL ANYONE SURVIVE?   

CLIFFIE'S NOTES ON THE MOST SPECIES-HATING MOVIE I'VE SEEN IN YEARS:

>> Are these just the usual run of Lampreys, imported from the western oceans into the Great Lakes?  No.  That would just be boring.  THESE Lamprey operatives reproduce in insane numbers, and they don't just feed on the body fluids of other fish; they RIP THEM TO SHREDS, leaving Lake Charlevoix a gory mess.  Then they COME ASHORE to seek their REAL prey: featherless bipeds.  From here, they get REALLY creative, invading household plumbing, sneaking past Lamprey-proof dams, and doing everything from scaling walls to launching themselves into the air to meet their recruiting quotas.  The fact that they are just normally-sized and normally-colored Lampreys, without sophisticated auxiliary brains or functional wings, was probably just an oversight.

>> There is a very effective scene of screaming swimmers running up onto the beach, dyed red to the hips because of all the fish guts in the water.  But none of the featherless bipeds in that scene even got nipped.  Why, you ask?  Good question. 

>> The Lampreys look pretty good; very much like the real thing, except that they seem to spend more time out of water than I do.  They are very frisky, to say the least, unlike the defeated specimens you see on ecology websites and fishing shows on TV.

>> I also couldn't tell you why these lampreys, like the title characters in the original Piranha, leap out of the water to attack the part of the Shaved Monkey that is above the surface, instead of doing it the easy way.  The only equivalent I can think of would be an all-human action movie that requires the killers to lower their heads into an aquarium, so they cannot see or breathe, before firing their guns. 

>>  The fundamental storyline of this movie would be profoundly offensive to most of the U.S. population if it were about two different groups of humans in conflict over what Adolf Hitler called lebensraum.  The whole story is this:  WE HAVE TO KEEP THEM BEHIND THE DAM SO THEY DON'T GET LOOSE!  NO, WAIT -- WE HAVE TO KILL THEM ALL!  At the point where the Lampreys are free to go where they want and live out their lives, ALL IS LOST, don't you see?  If the menace were, say, the first Jewish people to move into a WASP neighborhood, can you imagine the shaved-monkey uproar?

>> I also notice that nobody ever takes responsibility for importing Sea Lampreys into the Great Lakes in the first place.  Instead of treating the Lampreys as the enemy, why not look in the mirror, Naked Apes?  Instead of blaming us, why not praise our Lamprey sisters for finding a way to make lemonade out of the lemons you handed us when you stuffed us in a ballast hold and then abandoned us in waters we never asked to inhabit?  I'm sorry, I'm getting emotional...

>> We hear Shannon Doherty, who plays the Fiercely Protective Mom in the story, describe the heroes in utterly hateful terms -- "like an anus with teeth."  Nobody points out that she is being a prejudiced wretch; her husband, who works for Fish & Wildlife, doesn't even point out that his wife is terrified of the same creature who PAYS THEIR RENT.

>> One of the jigsaw pieces of this movie that seems to fit nowhere is that the human defenders of the lakes (ha!) seem alternately to be trying to keep the Lampreys OUT of Lake Charlevoix -- and keep them IN Lake Charlevoix.  Because if they get into the lake -- or out of it? -- they escape into Lake Michigan.  I have to say, this is completely bass-ackwards.  If there are Lampreys in Lake Charlevoix, they came FROM Lake Michigan, not from, say, downtown Kalamazoo.  And Lamprey operatives have been (as Shaved Monkeys see it) running amok in all the Great Lakes for many decades, so it's a little late to talk about keeping them out of the water.  Could the filmmakers really not know this? 

>> Another possible oversight:  Nobody makes any attempt to explain what is different about these particular Lampreys.  They even called in Jeremy "River Monsters" Wade via Skype as a Lamprey expert, but he never does any real Lamprey exposition.  They never made a single stab at that.  Wade's contribution was limited to bragging about his Lamprey battle scars.  (I'm waiting for the special Killer Lamprey episode of River Monsters  now.) 

>> The Fiercely Protective Mom's husband, the Fish and Wildlife Expert (Jason Brooks), makes no attempt to point out the inherent beauty and adaptability of the heroic fish.  (Nobody EVER notices that these are ocean fish who have adapted themselves to a full-time freshwater existence.  It's not unlike Shaved Monkeys learning to live on the surface of Mars without space suits, but it's an accomplishment NOBODY NOTICES.  What's that about?)   He also fails to correct the Secretly Recruited Human Child (Yar Koosha), his only son, when the kid mistakes a Bass for a Trout, but he does lovingly redirect the little boy to kill his pet Lamprey because, hey, it's got to be done!  A Lamprey is a Lamprey!  Dad also fails to see the contradiction in his own behavior -- he's the one who encouraged the kid to set up an aquarium for the Lamprey in the first place, over the objections of his species-bigot wife.

>> Fish and Wildlife has the now-familiar conflict with the Mayor of Lamprey City, here played by Christopher Lloyd, saying YOU'VE GOT TO CLOSE THE LAKE! while the mayor dismisses the menace -- after all, we can learn to EAT Lampreys like the Europeans do and there can't be THAT many of them, can there now?  For his tolerance and willingness to be recruited, Mayor Akerman...gets recruited.  And when I think about it, it's surprising that from a Naked Ape point of view, this recruitment scene is terribly sad and horrifying -- an old man eaten by Lampreys.  The character isn't hateful enough for the human viewer to gloat over his demise.  But he's likable enough for the fish viewer to feel that the conspiracy has won over a potentially powerful new ally.  In a movie devoted to glorifying the genocide of unwilling immigrants -- the closest all-human equivalent in moviedom might be Birth of a Nation -- I consider this a welcome moment of moral ambiguity. 

>> Nobody ever mentions in here that if they had been listening to Akerman all along, and eating Lampreys as Dagon intended, THE WAR WOULD ALREADY BE OVER. 

>> Of course, if they had been eating Lampreys all along, WE WOULD HAVE ALREADY WON THAT WAR.  But no Naked Ape realizes that!

>> Here's another odd moment:  the Lamprey Gestapo Sidekick Staunch Defender of Fish and Wildlife Principles, played by Zack Ward, spends almost the whole movie waxing wroth about the dangerous behavior of the Lampreys.  And he gets kind of choked up when his co-workers become Lamprey recruits victims, even when they eat the jerky guy nobody likes.  But he also apparently decides at some point that if you can't beat 'em, you might as well join 'em.  And he is SUCH a desirable recruit -- not least because he knows the inner workings and true agenda of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service -- that it looks as if every single Lamprey in the movie tried to recruit him personally.  That's the spirit, ladies!  Why he crossed over to our side is not made clear in the movie, but here's the only hint they give you:  this guy, Casper-the-Ghost-white, reveals at one point that the first human killed in the movie, a jovial African-American who discovers a Lamprey clog in a drainpipe, was dating his sister.  Could it be he realized that prejudice against Lampreys makes no more sense than prejudice against members of his own species?  This explanation adds up better than his last words before he disappears under a wriggling mass of Lampreys, that he might as well do it 'because he has no family.'  What's his sister -- chopped liver?  Never mind, Zack -- YOU HAVE A NEW FAMILY NOW. 

>> Although we never meet the sister, we can only imagine that she too might seek recruitment, having lost her brother and her boyfriend in the space of a few hours.  She'd be more than welcome, of course.

>> Speaking of family, what do we make of The Mailman's Kid, played by Ciarra Hanna although she bears zero resemblance to the actors playing her mother and father (Doherty and Brooks)?  She proves to be made of the same stuff as they are after all, dispatching the menace with a Weed Whacker while her mother douses them with kerosene and lights them up.  But why doesn't she look anything like them?  Heck, neither does her little brother.  In a movie where appearance seems to be everything, this may -- somehow -- be a non-issue. 

>> I did notice one other special Lamprey talent in the weed-whacker-and-kerosene sequence.  When you set fire to them...they scream.

>> Can someone tell me what the point is of shutting off the water supply to a house that already has Lampreys in every room, plus the heating ducts and on the roof?  How does that help?

>> The Seductive Neighbor, played by Susie Abromeit, did some of the finest acting in this story.  The stupefied expression as she realizes that she's found her TRUE DESTINY is the most realistic I've ever seen in ANY human-made killer-fish movie.  And the wonderful Lampreys-are-drilling-into-my-twitching-body sequence was almost a religious experience. 

>>  Contrast this against the way the cop bursts into the room, looks straight at Abromeit floating facedown in the pool, and barks at the quavering teenagers, "Where's the body!?"  If only fish could laugh.

>> I could not really dope out the true agenda of Scooter, the Lamprey Dog.  Watch the movie and see.  I seek input on this question.  We'll be discussing this at upcoming chapter meetings.

>> In the end, the featherless bipeds flee and the plucky immigrants WIN.  How is THAT not a happy ending?

This was a fun movie, paradoxically full of heavy social-political questions.  AND FLYING LAMPREYS.  Check it out.  THAT'S AN ORDER.