Zombie Lake (1981)

Director: Jean Rollin

Starring: Howard Vernon, Pierre-Marie Escourrou, Anouchka, Antonio Mayans, Nadine Pascal

More info: IMDb

Tagline: God help us if they rise again!

Plot: In a small village, somewhere in France, German soldiers, killed and thrown into the lake by the Resistance during WW II, come back.

My rating: 3/10

Will I watch it again? Nooooooo.

Nice special effects!

You can count on Jean Rollin for two things...sleaze and sleep - two things that shouldn't go together but he manages somehow. Pity, 'cause I enjoyed his earlier film, THE SHIVER OF THE VAMPIRE (1971).

How can you go wrong with Nazi zombies? Put them in a Jean Rollin flick.


I kid, but this is a poorly made movie. If it weren't for the Nazi zombies and the nudity there wouldn't be a single reason to watch it. Hell, there's still not much of a reason to watch it unless you're an insomniac. The makeup effects are unfinished (some faces are green but not the necks or ears, shit like that), the music is redundant and downright horrible whenever the organ is providing it, the acting is laughably bad and amateurish, the execution of the plot is uninteresting, long and drawn out.

First they're underwater in a tarp-lined tank...



and then they aren't.


It does, however, give us a realistic glimpse at what a female basketball team does for leisure.

I'd swear Rollin lifted that shot for shot from a National Geographic special. Look, there's just no way around this, ZOMBIE LAKE, despite a great poster and VHS cover box (I passed this title up at least a hundred times in the 80s video stores), is boring and offers very little in the way of horror and a lot in boobs. I'm not the kind of guy who likes to fall asleep from boredom looking at boobs on the telly. Jean Rollin's films can have that effect.