Review of Lake Mungo (2009) by John P — 29 Oct 2011

I thought this movie was pretty tremendous. It just has a tremendous sense of creating a very creepy atmosphere throughout the entire movie. Quite frankly, I thought it was better than Paranormal Activity.

This movie had a consistently creepy tone throughout. But it's also about how this family reacts to her death and everything that snowballed because of it. It's more about the secrets Alice kept and her family's reactions to those secrets, especially considering they found out after her death.

The movie also does a GREAT fucking job at coming across like a legitimate documentary instead of fiction. It's paced EXACTLY like a documentary in fact, and the performances are believable and not over the top at all.

I can't really say enough good things about this movie, if it was released this year I'd have said it's one of the best movies of the year (granted it would be at the bottom of a top ten list for example), much less one of the best horror movies of that particular year.

There's also this one particularly terrifying scene at the end, you'll know which one it is with the cell phone footage, and it's literally one of the most terrifying scenes of any movie I've ever seen in recent memory.

Of course, if you were to seek out this scene on youtube (which you can) it might not come across that way since it is taken out of context, but watching the movie and investing in this story and these characters, it's an incredibly creepy and spooky scene.

I didn't yell like a bitch, but it was a really effective scene. The credits are also particularly effective as well, so keep watching. Of course, this brings us to the American remake. Since this movie is mostly atmosphere and mood, I can't imagine how the remake will catch that.

I'm sure they can remake the movie almost scene for scene but it won't compare at all to this movie. It's almost like catching lightning in a bottle, you can only do it once. I don't really see the point, because it's not even like you're adapting something integral to the Australian culture it and adapting it to your culture.

It's a pretty straightforward movie, so I just don't see what's the point. Unless they're planning it to be more of a horror mockumentary, which will just be the drizzling shits. Anyway, this movie is tremendous and you should go out of your way to seek it out on Netflix, or any other way you want as long as it's not torrents.