The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

Opening a bag of chips has become disappointing; it is filled with air, and only a couple of lonely chips at the very bottom. Lake Alice is the same except that even the few chips at the bottom are a cheap copy of other snacks.

Lake Alice is supposed to be a horror feature about Sarah Thomas (Caroline Tudor) bringing her boyfriend Ryan (Brad Schmidt) to meet her parents over Christmas at their forest cabin. Ryan proposes to Sarah, but the family’s happiness is short-lived with the arrival of masked trespassers who want to kill them.

Other than the fact that the plot itself is one of the genre’s most worn out clichés, the intruders themselves wore masks that drew far too much inspiration from films like Friday the 13^th. The film’s plot and lines are so predictable, the audience didn’t even really need to watch. 

Lake Alice’s main problem though, is the fact that the entire film is 75 minutes long and the “horror” only starts after 45 minutes. That’s more than half of the film: yes, buildup is needed, but where is the film? The first 45 minutes consists of a cliché father not liking his daughter’s boyfriend, and scenes of random characters acting weird in an attempt to create a buildup which was mind numbingly boring. The actual “horror” starts with the family being scared of a knocking on the door and ranges from people getting killed in basic seen-it-before ways to thin plot point instances that seem ridiculous.

The acting was no better; Caroline Tudor’s facial expressions did not even match the way she is supposed to be feeling most of the time. Brad Schmidt was average, but his level of performance did not fill the shoes of the main role he had in the film, since his demeanour mostly stayed the same throughout the film. Peter O’Brien, playing Sarah’s father, manages to give the feature some colour in a few scenes, but not nearly enough to make the feature watchable.  Several other characters, like Sarah’s mother, her ex-boyfriend, and her ex boyfriend’s mother all had one thing in common in their performance: over the top acting.

Boring 45 minutes, cliché 25 minutes, with the film being an overall horrible copy of old films. Save your time, save your money, save yourself.