Po-Chih Leong | Through the Shattered Lens

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 2001’s Return To Cabin By The Lake! It can be viewed on YouTube.

Stanley Caldwell (Judd Nelson) is back!

At the end of Cabin By The Lake, screenwriter Stanley had managed to escape from the police by faking his own drowning. Return to Cabin By The Lake finds Stanley using a variety of disguises and fake identities in his effort to once again become a part of the film industry. He is particularly interested in the fact that his previous murder spree is being turned into a movie. He’s considerably less happy about the fact that everyone involved in the movie continually disparages his work as a screenwriter. He’s even less happy when he hears them speculating that there was a sexual-motive behind Stanley’s murders or that Stanley was acting out against his mother. For someone who spent the previous movie drowning innocent women and then visiting their bodies in the lake, Stanley sure does seem to be shocked to discover that most people don’t have a high opinion of him. You’re a murderer, Stanley. People don’t like murderers.

Anyway, as a master of disguise, Stanley is able to work his way into the production of the film. Even though everyone on the set is spending 24 hours a day obsessing on and recreating the crimes of Stanley, no one is suspicious of the guy who looks just like Stanley and who keeps saying stuff like, “Stanley would never do that!” Stanley becomes obsessed with script writer Andrea (Dahlia Salem). He also comes to resent the film’s shallow director, Mike Helton (Brian Krause, giving the film’s best performance). Stanley decides that he would be a better director of the film so he buries Mike alive and then takes over direction.

Return To Cabin By The Lake is a bit more deliberately humorous than the first film. If Cabin By The Lake was full of pleasant townspeople and earnest police officers, Return To Cabin By The Lake is populated with caricatures of various Hollywood phonies. Everyone involved in Return To Cabin By The Lake‘s film-within-a-film is blithely unconcerned with the feelings of the the victim’s loved ones nor do they really care about telling the story accurately. Helton’s only concern is that the script have enough sex. That Stanley not only takes over as director but turns out to be a pretty good at it would appear to be Return To Cabin By The Lake’s ultimate statement on the film industry.

Judd Nelson is a bit more energetic in the sequel than he was in the first film. That said, Return To Cabin The By The Lake makes the mistake of asking us to buy the idea of Stanley being a master of disguise. Judd Nelson is always going to look and sound like Judd Nelson, regardless of whether he’s wearing a wig or not.

Though it’s a bit constrained by being a made-for-TV movie, Return To Cabin By The Lake is a marked improvement on the first film, one that has more humor and a better performance from its lead. The film ends with an opening for another sequel but it was apparently never to be.

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.