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On the shores of Lake Michigan, the eccentric Captain Seafield (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, who also writes and directs) enlists a colourful crew of misfits in a bid to slay the hellish sea monster that prowls the murky depths. But as Seafield s obsession with exacting revenge on the creature that killed his father threatens to consume him, can weapons expert Sean Shaughnessy (Erick West), sonar whiz Nedge Pepsi (Beulah Peters) and former N.A.V.Y. - Nautical Athletes and adVenture Yunit officer Dick Flynn (Daniel Long) hold the show together? Shot in gloriously retro black and white on a shoestring budget, with most of the cast also performing multiple roles behind the camera, Lake Michigan Monster is an inventive, irreverent and riotously entertaining ode to the classic monster movies of yesteryear: an absurdist urban legend guaranteed to appeal to the big kid in all of us. (Arrow Films)
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What I appreciate about Lake Michigan Monster is the creative passion and ability to make something this compact and stylish on a tiny budget. However, writers Ryland Brickson Cole Tews and Mike Cheslik rely more on verbal gags than visual ones, which doesn't quite work out in the end, and the film isn't as funny as it tries to be. They fix this problem perfectly in their follow-up, Hundreds of Beavers, which relies 99% on imaginative visual humor and is absolutely bombastic in doing so.
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Lake Michigan Monster proves that a pastiche can be both eclectic and original, as well as infectiously entertaining. Hyperactive filmmaker Ryland Brickson Cole Tews combines the visual style of Guy Madin (whom he thanks in the closing credits) with the inventive originality of Karl Zeman, the disarming naïveté of classic monster flicks and the phantasmagorical playfulness and Dadaist exuberance of SpongeBob. We could go on and on with allusions and inspirational references, but the key point remains that this enthusiast project put together by a group of friends, who take turns in front of and behind the camera, enchantingly combines the fantastical with the commonplace and the imaginative with cheapness, not only in terms of the behind-the-scenes creative work, but also in the narrative style and the story itself. The story is absurdly simple, but in this case the path from the beginning to the end peculiarly does not follow a straight line. Like a crazy doodle, it takes absurd turns that don’t necessarily push the narrative forward in any way (on the contrary, it sometimes brings the narrative to a halt or even takes it backwards), because the playful imaginativeness here takes priority over ordinary logic. For some, this magnificent “nautical nonsense” will be an annoying display of affectation and zero-budget shoddiness, but for others, it is a longed-for nutty amusement that blends bizarreness with naïveté and terror in a sort of intoxicatingly short-circuited anti-logic. In fact, the most adequate comparison with which to describe Lake Michigan Monster is as a cross between SpongeBob and Forbidden Zone – it never occurred to me that these seemingly completely opposite poles of phantasmagoria could be so naturally combined, but it just goes to show that there really are no limits to imagination.
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