You probably haven’t heard the name Mercedes Bryce Morgan in
horror circles quite yet despite being on her third feature Bone Lake opening
in theaters this week by Bleecker Street and its unclear how much more of her
we’ll hear of after this new release. Billed
in every poster as a kind of hard R-rated raunchy erotic thriller chock full of
sex and nudity, featuring slick scope 2.35:1 cinematography by Saw X cameraman
and featuring Malignant scream queen Maddie Hasson in the leading role, Bone
Lake was sold as a racy throwback to the heyday of 1980s teen horror or the
height of Italian fantasy horror where naked bodies smashing together in
between gore filled slayings flirted as hard as it could with soft core
pornography.
At least that’s how this
new film was sold, an LD Entertainment streamer bumped up to theatrical release
that looks alright in a post-Argento or Bava universe but as a potentially
tawdry potent naughty-horror flick it winds up being more dull and flat vanilla
tame than the first Fifty Shades of Grey entry. Its sort of like The Girl Next Door which
promised some American Pie sort of exploitation only to chicken out
entirely at the moment of truth.
A young couple, Sage (Maddie Hasson) and her boyfriend Diego
(Marco Pigossi) venture through the countryside to the secluded titular Bone
Lake for a weekend getaway at a luxurious, mysterious mansion. Soon as they get down to business having sex
with their clothes on, their sexcapades are interrupted by the untimely
unexpected arrival of mercurial and sexually forthright couple Will (Alex Roe)
and Cin (Andra Nechita). At first their
coexistence seems peaceable but in the time-honored tradition of bad neighboring
horror-couples ala Speak No Evil, gradually the newcomers start crossing
friendly boundaries like Will stealing Diego’s intended engagement ring for
Sage and passing it off as his own to Cin.
Soon a joint effort is underway to seduce and drive the couple apart
with secrets and lies aired into the ether until eventually Sage and Diego,
aware of the deception, soon discover a dark secret about their unwanted
roommates.
Having just seen
Michele Soavi’s downright scopophilic Cemetery Man and raised on the premarital-sex-equals-death
logic of the Friday the 13th and Halloween films,
knowing where some of these sex-and-scares horror flicks have gone,
comparatively Bone Lake is toothless.
That’s not to say it doesn’t have some slick looking visuals or halfway
decent performances with Maddie Hasson channeling a kind of Florence Pugh vibe,
Brazilian actor Marco Pigossi occasionally dropping his accent, The 5th
Wave actor Alex Roe doing a riff on the ‘nice guy’ from The Guest and Romanian actress Andra Nechita doing her
best to strut about enticingly when she isn’t stalking the couple with a
butcher knife.
Yeah there are some I guess wild developments
in the third act when we get our impending “grand reveal” but even then decades
prior a certain Park Chanwook already took said reveal all the friggin’ way. I wish Mercedes Bryce Morgan all the best in
what’s shaping up to be a pretty prolific independent horror filmmaking career,
just don’t believe the hype with this one.
It’s a wannabe Halloween horror strip club without any strippers. I don’t see this, no pun intended, making
much of a splash.
--Andrew Kotwicki