19. Zombie Lake (1981)
The ultimate 'so bad it is good' Euro horror movie, Zombie Lake is a terrible movie, but so awful it achieves a kind of warped genius. In a small French village in the countryside, young women are disappearing. The superstitious locals blame a near by lake which they believe is haunted. The mayor of the town doesn't seem to care about what is going on. A woman is found with her throat torn out by the lake and this arouses the curiosity of a Parisian reporter who is in the village. The lake has a horrible history spreading back to the Second World War. Resistance fighters killed a load of Nazis and flung their bodies into the lake. Now every time the water is disturbed, Zombie Nazis spring into murderous action. Unbelievably silly, Jean Rollin was very embarrassed about this picture. The Nazi zombies have green paint on their face that doesn't seem to spread round to the back of their necks. There is a terrible story arc about one of the zombies who during the war, had a relationship with a village woman and fathered a daughter with her. This particular zombie seems to feel the emotions of love and tenderness when he sees his daughter. They even walk down the street hand in hand! There is a lot of very gratuitous nudity in the film, mostly filmed under water. Groups of female netball teams just cannot wait to leap out of their vans, toss their clothes like salad and fling themselves, naked, into the lake where Rollin's camera lingers a bit too leeringly on the pubic regions of the netball players. Just jaw droppingly stupid and inept in every way possible. But you cannot saw you are a watcher of bad films until you see Zombie Lake.