Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay.  Today’s film is 2000’s Cabin By The Lake!  It  can be viewed on YouTube.

Screenwriter Stanley Caldwell (Judd Nelson) has been hired to write a slasher film and, to the concern of both the film’s director (Bernie Coulson) and Stanley’s agent (Susan Gibney), Stanley is taking his time to write the script.  Stanley says that he’s determined to write something more than just a typical “dead teenager” film.  His script is about a murderer who kills his victims and then dumps them into a nearby lake.  The killer spends his time tending his underwater garden.

What is taking Stanley so long?  Stanley is doing research, which means that he’s kidnapping women, holding them prisoner in his cabin, and then dumping their bodies into the lake.  Along the way, he’s observing how the victims act and he’s incorporating his research into his script.  Though Stanley tells himself that he’s just doing research, it’s obvious that the script is no longer his main concern.  Now, Stanley is just enjoying working in his garden.

Stanley’s latest victim is Mallory (Hedy Burress), a young woman who works at the town’s movie theater and who has a long-standing fear of the water.  While Stanley is holding Mallory captive and studying both her and her fear of water, Deputy Boone Preston (Michael Weatherly) is searching for Mallory.  And, of course, Stanley is running out of time to finish his script.

Cabin In The Lake was produced by and originally aired on the USA Network and, as a result, it has a much darker sense of humor than one might otherwise expect to find in a made-for-tv horror movie from 2000.  Most of the humor centers around the pretensions of the film industry, with both Stanley and his film’s director trying to turn their little slasher movie into something more than just another dead teenager film.  A good deal of the film centers around a group of special effects and makeup artists, who are recruited to help capture the killer and they’re all likable in their dorky way.  The scenes of Stanley’s underwater garden achieve a certain dream-like grandeur and, as someone who has a morbid fear of drowning, I could certainly relate to Mallory’s fear of the water.

That said, this is one of those films where the parts are definitely greater than the whole.  I think the film’s biggest problem was that Judd Nelson was a bit bland in the role of Stanley, flatly delivering his lines and barely bothering to show a hint of emotion.  If anything, Nelson appears to be a bit bored with the film.  Hedy Burress is sympathetic as Mallory and Michael Weatherly is believable as the upstanding deputy but a film like this lives or dies based on its villain and Nelson sleepwalks through the role.  As well, for all the humorous moments that do work, it soon becomes obvious that this is a one-joke film and portraying Hollywood as being a place full of shallow people is not creative enough a joke to sustain an entire film.  The end result is a film that is ultimately frustratingly uneven.