Eden Lake
An attractive couple goes for a nice weekend getaway near a beautiful lake only to be gradually terrorized by a group of young hoodlums.
During Thanksgiving a few years ago I remember listening to my cousin speak to my uncle about the movie "Culigula" starring Malcolm McDowell. He spoke of the brutality of the film being offensive and downright appaling, even to the point of hindering its own artistic integrity. My uncle defended it, claiming that the camera work and editing of the film had far outreached any claim for
the "smut" title that the film had accumulated so widely in the world of criticism. I finally watched a clip of it the other day on youtube, the one in which McDowell smiles gleefully as helpless victims' heads are chopped off by a giant death machine while the crowd enthusiastically throws eggs at the head-only-exposed faces during the poor bastards' last moments. I chuckled a little, rewinded it, and decided that my uncle may have had a point.
Culigula is not a horror film, yet it drenches viewers with terror as they watch McDowell desanctify every aspect of humanity that has ever been pedastaled by our moral society. "Eden Lake" on the other hand, is as pure and uncut as horror comes, only this time, the villain is not masked nor supernatural nor psychopathic, the latter of which Culigula himself had been labeled.Nope. Our
villains are our children of course. Beaten, bruised, affection starved, and hopelessly lost. During Lake's last moments, as our female protagonist stumbles into the midst of a woodsy house party, covered in literally blood, shit, and sweat, the viewer does not get any kind of impression that the character has been saved. The grown-ups hesitantly take her inside and clean her up as she
begs for the ambulance and police. We sit there and think, "how in the hell is this chick going to explain to these people that she has just been terrorized by a bunch of kids?" Well, outside the cinematic landscape it's actually quite simple, but in this case we can at least associate with the sheer anarchy present in the scene, and only hope for the best. Oh and did I mention that "Eden Lake" pissed me the fuck off?
As previously mentioned, the villains are kids. Did I say villains? Well I guess there is only one villain, but with multiple child-henchmen to carry out his malicious thoughts. Oh and I mean malicious. Some of the more prominent aspects of this kid's resume include knife torture, securely fastening grown men to tree stumps using rusty barb wire, and peer pressuring his lesser pals into helping him do so. Only something doesn't quite feel right about this whole nihilism thing. Mainly it's that from the start, these kids are portrayed as a couple of regular hoods, spitting, blaring rap music, smoking pot, and starting unnecessary confrontations. So how did we go from "nobody loves me so I'll be as rude and loud as I want" to "the world is cold and desolate and needs to be destroyed!"? Well apparently it's because of a dead dog.
"Eden Lake" will have you turning your head, fists clenched, teeth grinding as you watch its plot points unravell. It will saturate your head with its themes of nihilism and apocalyptic glory, and in all probability will completely horrify you. So in the genre of horror films, it has earned an A++ for its efforts. What Lake won't do, as so many of my favorite horror films have accomplished
in the past, is make sense. Brutal violence and excessive gore can be found in most 1980's monster movies, including the ones that we now laugh at. So how does transforming the cheeseball monster or maddened redneck in those laughable films to "lost children" warrant the issueing of a bold socio-political statement in the form of a horror film? I guess it's the mean dad we see at the end
of the movie, or perhaps the exaggerated gullibility of all the villain's lesser kind. Darwin? Nope. Nietzche? Not exactly. I was thinking more along the lines of Bush.
