I know what you're thinking - get the heck outta here Blood Bay or whatever, you've seen all this schtick ten dozen times before and had every frame of this movie memorised before it was even a gleam in some hack screenwriter's eye. Some form of aquatic biology gets out of control, random sanitation worker and old fisherman with a dog disappear, wildlife guy investigates, mayor won't close the lake, out of work formerly semi-famous actors mouth a script that will include lines like "we've got to lure them to the power station!" and "Kyle!".

Okay you got me. But I'll bet you've never seen it done by Animal Planet. About lampreys. A desperate lamprey is a dangerous lamprey the movie warns.

First off it hurts us all, Christopher Lloyd, when you are in Blood Lake dying with your pants around your ankles on the toilet bugging your eyes out like lampreys are shooting up your ass. If you need money that bad I have some yard work needs done.

So, I guess we know there really is a TV network making worse movies than the Sci Fi channel. Let's go ahead and dump out the whole mean-spirited reviewer's bag of spiteful adjectives on this thing: bland, insipid, formulaic, banal, inane, trite, ooh let's try jejune, predictable, scored like an infomercial generic plastic kiddie-pool fluff just like a Sci Fi Channel movie, but more like that.

You know how we stuck up types like to accuse things of being "an insult to our intelligence"? Well this movie actually does treat you like a remedial preschooler. Gonna lay a scene on you here. One of the protagonists is attacked in her car by flying lampreys (I know but that's not it) after parking in the middle of a massive swarm of the things with the window down. Now the heroes of the picture pull up behind her and instead of helping they ring her on her cell phone to offer advice on the situation, which is "get out of the car!", i.e. go from an area where there are about six eels to an area where there are thousands (still not it - and I know lampreys are not true eels but a kind of jawless fish similar to hagfishes).

It should be noted that when one of the guys tries to get out of his car he's physically restrained because "you would have been killed!", so technically it's a prank call. But she had to put the phone down anyway in order to flail her arms wildly about the eels so she never hears them tell her to exit the vehicle, and of course a panicked woman isn't going to come up with something like that on her own so the lampreys shoot right in and explode her head 'cause lampreys can do that. But none of this even yet is the contempt for your intelligence I was referring to.

Here's the coup-de-gras to this whole remarkable sequence: the director apparently says to himself "this scene of them bellowing into a cell phone while she's flipped out covered in eels does not make it obvious enough to the audience that they are trying to warn her by phone about the eels and she is unable to hear them or respond. We need to insert a shot of the phone sitting there not being answered". You have just been called a moron by the made for television movie Blood Lake.

Now again I know what you're thinking {said like Magnum P.I.}. I'm being a big stuffed shirt here and not getting the irony, taking it seriously when it's only meant as a tongue-in-cheek monster movie. But that's just it; no, it's not. I know tongue-in-cheek monster movies. I know Dead Alive, Return of the Living Dead, Tremors, et al. and even much lower brow stuff like Monsturd. Hell I've even seen Troma movies, but let's not talk about that. But no this isn't any kind of fun B monster movie. It's more like eating a big wad of unsweetened cotton candy. To illustrate, here's the last 15 minutes of the movie described deadpan with no snide reviewer attitude:

The people figure out that lampreys are incredibly attracted to lamprey livers and will move toward them at top speed - I don't know that's what it said - so everyone starts picking livers out of the million dead ones laying around so they can make a big enough pile to lure the live ones somewhere. They don't have enough livers so one guy who I have to say did actually pull off an acting scene earlier tries to harvest more in the sewers but is killed by lamprey eels of all things. Also the teenage daughter becomes angry at her dad for not remembering her new boyfriend's name, but the boyfriend helps pick lamprey livers and then the dad does remember his name and they bond. Turns out they really did have enough livers after all so they put them near a power line and all the lampreys arrive instantly and are electrocuted. Then as the family is leaving town the heroic dog you were afraid they had forgotten about who saved the boy earlier by biting a lamprey off him runs after the car and...is let in. As it enters the vehicle it is warned to watch its tail.

Okay maybe li'l snide but my point is some things are so poor that merely describing them is a form of mockery. Man I feel like shit now. Seeing something like this makes me more afraid of people than torture porn.

Line: "Michael Nicole behind you lampreys"