Cabin by the Lake
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| Cabin by the Lake | |
|---|---|
 Cabin by the Lake VHS cover |
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| Directed by | Po-Chih Leong |
| Written by | David Stephens |
| Starring | Judd Nelson |
| Distributed by | USA Network |
| Release date(s) | 2000 |
| Running time | 91 minutes |
| Country |  United States |
| Language | English |
| Followed by | Return to Cabin by the Lake |
Cabin by the Lake is a black comedy/horror TV movie released in 2000. It tells the story of Stanley, played by Judd Nelson, a serial killer masquerading as a script writer for a new horror film, but killing young girls for "research." It was directed by Po-Chih Leong.
[edit] Synopsis
The movie takes place in Summit Lake, where Stanley is renting a cabin to write a script for a new movie where a killer drowns young girls and keeps them underwater as a macabre garden. Incidentally, that is exactly what Stanley is doing. The last girl he captures, Mallory, is rescued right after Stanley drops her in the water by his friends, a police officer named Steve and a couple who owns a movie special-effects shop nearby. Mallory then gives the idea to make a plaster-mold of herself, with a camera as an eye, to catch the killer when he returns to his garden. When Stanley returns to the bodies, he soon discovers the ploy, and quickly escapes, and due to wearing a scuba mask, his identity remains unknown.
Mallory, assuming herself safe, stays at a hotel room for the night, but is again captured by Stanley while in the bathtub. The whole process starts over as he prepares to again attempt to drown her, but complications arise when Stanley's agent Regan, a boisterous woman, and the director to the film he is writing, arrives at the cabin unexpectedly. He kills the director with a cleaver, then imprisons Regan with Mallory. He then takes them both to the lake to drown them, but Steve and the other police dive and quickly release them, while Stanley is trapped underwater with a rope around his leg. He is assumed dead, as Mallory tries to recover from the experience, still seeing his face in the water.
The last scene has Regan, still alive, but a bit battered, talking to someone about a movie in which a killer buries his victims alive. She asks the person how the person feels as they're buried alive. The camera shows the person to be Stanley in a very obvious costume (but she comedically does not notice), as he says "I'm still doing the research."
[edit] Trivia
- The movie in the film is initially titled "Garden of Flesh," but in a meeting with the director, he wants it to be a black comedy (to Stanley's disapproval) and it is later renamed "Cabin by the Lake," therefore having a "movie-within-a-movie" effect.
