Lake Michigan Monster (2018)

 

Director: Ryland Brickson Cole Tews

Screenplay: Ryland Brickson Cole Tews and Mike Cheslik

Cast: Ryland Brickson Cole Tews as Seafield; Erick West as Sean Shaughnessy; Beulah Peters as Nedge Pepsi; Daniel Long as Dick Flynn; Wayne Tews as Ashcroft

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #256

 

Somewhere near Milwaukee...

It could be seen as a very bad sign if one person, here Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, is the star and the director and the co-writer, etcetera etcetera...admittedly that could be seen as cynicism but also there have been too many examples, in various fields let alone cinema, of people with a lot of power using it just for their own hubris. Thankfully, Tews has no interest in this, no qualms with playing the prat onscreen, with the perfect "shout to the back of the theatre" voice acting style to match. This is his first time in the director's chair, and with co-writer Mike Cheslik having directed work too in their collaborations, this feels far more a group that has amassed itself as collaborators, where even one of your lead actors, Beulah Peters, was the camera operator too. This group, a modern day version of regional cinema, filming out of Milwaukee in Wisconsin as well as set there, even got assistance from Joe Castro, the prolific director-special effects creator to create the monster suit, as this film clearly with a small budget wanted to make a monster film with love and laughs. One, even if it shows its budget and that it is a modern digital film with fake grain, which occasionally could have made Guy Maddin somewhere up in Canada smile.

A man named Seafield (Tews) loses his father to a mysterious sea monster in a fishing boat accident, one questioned in whether the boat even left the land at all. Acquiring a group of specialists to find and kill the beast, with unique names like Nedge Pepsi (Peters), Lake Michigan Monster is a comedy first of all when it comes off as a sensible idea to bring a broadsword to kill a nautical monstrosity, or having arguments about friendly fire. This is a very silly film, one with the decency to even shot scenes first person underwater, even if most of the later underwater sequences are composites of a homemade quality, wanting to be ambitious with what resources were available.  It is a series of jokes mostly at the expense of most of the cast, but specifically Seafield, who eventually has to accept his fate to fight the accused creature. Be it the multiple failed plans which are really an excuse for pun names to amuse themselves - such as "Nauty Lady", which presumes the monster is a heterosexual lady beast, so may fancy a nude male stud (with a black blur preserving his dignity) swimming her waters - or that Seafield is increasingly revealed to be a sad sack.

Not even the fact that his wife, a significantly older woman, makes inedible fish sticks can top far more embarrassing truths about him. That he is not actually a sea captain at all, despite his brother (with one eye due to their father's "no puking on board" policy) being closer to one, nor is able to actually pay his mercenaries. Even one joke takes advantage of budgetary limitations, about having to shot in what is a real nautical museum in a lighthouse, one most of us would like to go to, by making it part of Seafield's trait of pathological lying. If you have to make a film with limitations as an independent production, making something bold is to be admired, but also being creative rather than lazy and predictable is also a thing to praise, strangely a rare filmmaking habit if you watch enough movies. Here, this is the case where they thankfully desired to entertain the viewer, though you need to appreciate the humour to get the most out of Lake Michigan Monster.

Low budget or not, this is not even attempting nautical horror like Robert Egger's The Lighthouse (2019) in the damndest. Even if I could imagine Willem Dafoe's character having such a back-story, Eggers' historically accurate and bizarre film never had someone discharged from the navy for sexual misconduct with the woodwind section, or for shooting someone in an unexplained "weird" scenario. Neither do I imagine Robert Pattinson, in his antagonism to the seagulls in that film, having a conversation mid-fight, out of bafflement, talking about why liqueur stores inexplicably close early at night in Milwaukee. The farcical nature of Lake Michigan Monster is worn on its sleeve and what I admired within it, where to present an egg, when a male character is made pregnant by the monster, you get what looks like a giant version of the plastic containers for a Kinder Surprise toy if painted in dots on it too. That and, in mind that The Lighthouse did have sea shanties at one point, this is a monster movie with an unexpected amount of musical numbers which are surprisingly good.

The handmade quality, and being a pastiche to past genres by way of the modern day technology really makes the Guy Maddin comparison more justifiable than presumed. The film is a really elaborate (and more heavily promoted) micro budget film which deserves the praise. A little detail or two, such as an underwater castle which is clearly provided from a fish tank model, raises a smile and the film, to its complete credit, never gets predictable. Unexpected siblings being discovered comes to play, alongside Seafield being haunted by one of the dead mercenaries, buried without permit in a graveyard with his beloved weapons, but chasing Seafield as part of a curse to murder him. Not restricted by budget limitations, a film like this compensates for so much bad use of modern technology like CGI in modern films with higher budgets, even incredibly lazy examples such as using effects in Avengers: Endgame (2019)  for hairstyles rather than hire a hairdresser¹, because it is used to portray very entertaining things with fewer resources.

Here, cheaper uses of CGI (and superimposing) allows us, when Seafield is forced to hire his family's legacy of a ghost army in underground church, the sight of man bridge of them face a tentacle monster as Seafield plays checkers on the beach with one. Lake Michigan Monster got the point of a film that, whether high art or for fun, a film is both an expression of one and also meant to compel. Here everyone who was on the production shows affability, likable, and spent the time providing us the viewers an amusing farce. It is lazy to say this has heart unlike higher budgeted multiplex films, especially if one day a "multiplex" becomes an obscure term, but in this case, it was true. This one is more interesting in that this got the luck of attracting Arrow Video, the cult video distributor who in the late 2010s added additional new licenses to their catalogue alongside classic preservations. This a great choice for them for such amusing pleasures it provided.

 

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1) Reference here.