Lake Michigan Monster

Dans Lake Michigan Monster, j'apprécie la passion créative et la capacité à faire quelque chose de si compact et stylisé avec un budget pourtant minuscule. Malgré tout, les créateurs Ryland Brickson Cole Tews et Mike Cheslik comptent ici plus sur les gags verbaux que visuels, et ça, ça ne leur réussit pas tellement au final, rendant le film moins drôle qu'il ne tente de l'être. Ce problème a été parfaitement résolu dans leur film suivant Hundreds of Beavers, qui mise à 99 % sur un humour visuel inventif et qui est absolument génial. [Sitges 2023] (21/10/2023)

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. (08/11/2020)