Zombie Lake (1981)

Cinematic stylist Jean Rollin brings us a picture in which a town must face not just their own, but all of Europe's terrible past as a menagerie of zombies arise from the local lake intent on consuming the countless naked women in the village.

The lake itself is the inviting and yet terrible subconscious of man. Therein are hidden the dark secrets and terrors of our existence, the horrible truths long-suppressed. The town's mayor explains this lake was once used in black masses to dispose of sacrificed children. The townsfolk, during the German occupation, disposed of murdered Nazi soldiers in that very lake. Now the soldiers are rising and killing, the vessels of vengeance and intergenerational guilt; the repressed truths having soured into the death drive, 'Thanatos.'

Meanwhile, Eros, the life-instinct, is represented by the hordes of beautiful, naked women, whose lithe, nubile bodies, smooth and tight, perfect for bearing the seed of man, become the food of zombies. In a startling but ecstatically true moment, Eros is victorious, for the love of one of the zombies for the French girl he fathered before he was murdered may just hold the key to their destruction.

Anyway, so this is a bad movie, but it's also a really weird movie. There's a lengthy flashback segment in the middle of the film that tells, without dialogue, the love story of a German soldier for a French woman and the tragedy that befell them. This leads to an image that must be unique to this film: a little girl walking hand-in-hand with a Nazi zombie down an old cobblestone road in a French village.

There are lots of naked girls. They're quite sexy and all skinny-dipping mad. But Rollin, dirty old man he is, shoots them skinny-dipping from underwater, giving us awkward shots of their furry vaginas as their legs flail about. As Seinfeld puts it, "There's good naked; and there's bad naked." This is somewhere in between. It's not really sexy at all and kind of stupid-looking, but they're still cute girls. It gets even stupider-looking when the zombies start grabbing.

Ultimately, all I can say is that I found myself quite bored watching the film, despite some of the interesting things to be found within. For this kind of a movie, it's way too ponderous. The best part is actually the silent love story in the center.