Film Review: Lake Mungo

Bit out of focus there, dude.
Probably just need to adjust the lens a bit.

'Mungo' - now that's a scary-sounding name, isn't it? Like 'Edgar'. Or 'Maxine'. Or 'Heather'.

I'm dead, me.

So; Lake Mungo. It's YET ANOTHER film about a haunted lake. Jeez, how many haunted-lake films does that make? Oh, that's right, only one. Because a plot which relies on a haunted lake is a terrible idea; the sort of thing that a stoner would dream up twenty-seven years into his career, shortly after befalling some form of blunt-trauma head injury.

Putting the dire concept aside, what do we have? Well, we have an Australian family visiting a haunted lake (snigger) for a holiday (fuck you, Thomas Cook!), only to find that their daughter is to be viciously murdered by the ghostly, demonic presence haunting the lake. Does it count as 'murder' if one of the parties is already deceased? I'm not entirely sure that it does. How would you even put a ghost on the stand?

Yeah, the trial's not going too well to be honest.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed though, or at least, I would be, if they hadn't decomposed and fallen off.

It's really annoying, losing your daughter in a haunted lake, so the dead girl's family spend the next 90 minutes explaining just how annoying it is. It's the sort of thing that I can image my mother watching, just so that she can tell her friends how 'thought-provoking' it was afterwards.

Is this, A. 'thought-provoking', or B. 'blurry'.
It's a tough call.

Turns out - it's quite boring being dead. To liven things up a bit, Dead Girl decides to start making repeated appearances in family photographs. You know, it's funny; most women H-A-T-E it when you take their photo, but Dead Girl, she's all like 'Hey! Hey take my photo y'all! Cmon!'. Dead Girl loves the camera, which is good, because  I think we can all agree that she's pretty photogenic.

H-O-T.

Dead girl's family get a bit 'all up in yo' face' about their daughter making a posthumous guest-appearance in their photo album. They start asking questions, mainly questions such as: 'What the shit is going on?', and ' Why is our recently-deceased child appearing posthumously in family photographs?'. 

Say 'cheese', bitch!

Dead Girl: now officially overstaying her shitting welcome.

 Dead girl - seemingly a relentless self-promoter - steps-up her campaign for attention by going digital -she quickly tires of photography (bor-iing!) and graduates to video media....and...uh...and also to beating the living shit out of her elder brother. Basically, Dead Girl, she's all like: 'Hey! Notice me you ignorant cunts!! I am here y'know!'.

Dead Girl: she's such an applause-pony.

Dead Girl's family respond to this desperate cry for attention by...well, they sort of don't. Mostly, they ignore it, in fact. To be fair - that's the best thing to do with an attention-whore, y'know, just ignore her and she'll go away. Probably.

Seriously guys; just ignore her and she'll tire of it eventually.

Dead Girl doesn't go away; instead, she reveals (SPOILER ALERT!) that she had icky, under-the-legal-age-of-consent sex with her next door neighbour and his oddball wife. There's quite alot of photographic evidence about Dead Girl's extra-curricular bedroom activities, and, as you can imagine, Sex-Pest Neighbour and Oddball Wife don't really want anyone to find out what they've been up to.

Dead Girl's bedroom: not a safe hiding place for sex videos.
Makes you look a bit guilty, apparently

Here's a tip, boys and girls: if you don't want someone to find out who you've been fucking, don't film it. The sinister neighbours try in vain to get back the sex video that they made with Dead Girl, but they can't locate it. That's the thing with being a Paedophile, it's an administrative nightmare. The neighbours make a run for it and are never found, but at least now we all know...uh..well we know that Dead Girl had been having sex with her neighbour.

Don't judge me you cunts!

Dead Girl's brother steps forward and admits that he's actually been faking the seemingly-ghostly footage of his sister; apparently 'he thought it would make things better'. Now, I'm not being funny, but what in the shit was this fool thinking? How is pretending that your dead sister is haunting you going to clear things up?

All better now?

Dead Girl's family decide that it's time to take a breather, so they go to visit the place where Dead Girl went on her last school trip. The place they go to is called 'Runtime has now reached 96 minutes probably time to wrap this shit up y'all'. They find out that Dead Girl buried her mobile phone and her favourite bracelet on the school trip, and they keep asking 'Why?'. 'Why would she bury her favourite bracelet?!' and the audience has this to say in response: 'We don't give a pair of plastic tits why she buried her damn bracelet, just show us the fucking ghost so that we can all go home'.

Nice place; shame about all the mounds of discarded teenage paraphernalia.

Watch out now, because THE TWIST is on its way! Woop woop! Everybody loves a twist! Dead Girl's family come to discover that Dead Girl was in fact being haunted....being haunted by her future self. I'm just going to let that sink in a bit with you, kay, cos it's, uh, it's pretty special. And I want us all to take a moment just to...absorb.

This is what's referred to as a 'weak ending'.

Now one thing's for sho', we're ALL being haunted by our future selves. Every time that I look in the mirror and see left-over splashes of booze congealing on my face, and cold Fillet-o-fish matting my five-o-clock shadow, I see how things are going to pan out, and it ain't pretty. What I didn't realise was that I have been wasting my self-disgust and personal sense of self-loathing on myself, when I could have made it all into a feature film and shared it with you lucky fucks years ago.

So what have we learnt from Lake Mungo?

• Stop filming shit that you don't want people to see! (I'm talking to you, Scarlet Johannssen).
• Australian teenagers lose their virginity to their neighbours.
• Family camping trips always end in disaster.
• Don't invite a medium into your house, because he'll probably start trying to fuck your son.