LAKE MICHIGAN MONSTER (2018) ¢ ¢
D: Ryland Brickson Cole Tews
Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, Beulah Peters,
Erick West, Daniel Long, Wayne Tews
A crackpot comedy, shot cheaply (in Milwaukee and Muskegon), about a sea captain obsessed with hunting and killing a monster lurking offshore in Lake Michigan. It's the kind of thing the Marx Brothers and Monty Python excelled at, but pure zaniness can be hard to pull off. I watched it with a receptive crowd at Seattle's Grand Illusion, and beyond about the half-way point, the laughter really died away. (It loses something when the captain's "band of rowdy cutthroats" leave the scene and the captain takes over the story.) It's in black and white, and there are some imaginative, low-grade effects.
