[yasr_overall_rating]
When six friends from Massachusetts travel to the Jersey shore, they end up on Clinton road at a house on a lake. They’re not alone and one by one they disappear but who will survive?”
I love scary movies, especially those that deal with the supernatural. It’s a dimension that many people are not familiar with, on a personal level so the thought of being scared by a ghost or specter intrigues them to no end, that’s why movies and TV shows of this particular genre are typically successful. “The Lake on Clinton Road” however, is the exception. It utilizes the perfect location for a scary movie, an old house that sits on an undisturbed lake, far away from civilization but director DeShon Hardy seems more concerned with the scare factor and visual effects than character development so when the people in the movie begin to experience strange occurrences and start disappearing one by one, we literally don’t care about them because we are never given the opportunity to get to know them.
The director steals ideas from other more successful scary movies and incorporates them into his film, with uninspired effect. We’ve already seen the character being dragged across the floor by an invisible force, or the figure that walks in front of the camera unexpectedly, designed to scare the audience, all of these gimmicks have been, and will continue to be exploited in the horror genre but here, they lack any sort of impact, feeling more like inferior knock-offs of the real thing. When a group of friends decide to spend the weekend at an old house by a lake, things quickly go from jubilant partying to characters disappearing without any explanation.
When Jillian (Leah Jones) finds an old photo of herself as a child in the basement, she can’t figure out how it got there and then strange things begin to transpire. She begins to see the specter of a young boy who haunts the house and appears to be the one causing all of the unseen mayhem. As she gradually succumbs to possession, the rest of her friends encounter their own scary episodes and then they disappear and by the end of the film, Jillian and her boyfriend Alex (Richard Ryker) are the only two survivors who manage to escape. Instead of telling a somewhat intelligible story, explaining why characters are disappearing and who exactly the young boy is and how he fits into the overall picture, we get no such narrative and the movie abruptly ends.
Even some of the most ludicrous horror movies are able to explain the primary plot, either employing the use of flashbacks (“Friday the 13th”) or a simple conversation between some of the characters where one tells the group about a supposed old hermit who lives in the woods or some such tale. “The Lake on Clinton Road” completely ignores the logic behind such a necessary process and as a result, it suffers the consequences. The acting for the most part, was sub-par but I don’t put all the blame on the actors, if writer/director DeShon Hardy spent as much time on his script and story development as he did on visual effects and the scare factor, he’d have a somewhat more believable movie filled with good performances and a satisfactory finale.
Available on VOD and DVD July 17
