The opening salvo of Horrorfest’s Saturday film list was a palate cleanser. I could also have said that of last night’s Unearthed, except that there was nothing to be cleansed from and that said movie really wasn’t as good. And, okay, I’ll be opening up a little bit of confusion by claiming that Lake Dead was a good movie, so I want to be clear and say that it wasn’t good. It was slightly better than the Skinemax fare it occasionally looked like, and it had a truly excellent climactic line of dialogue. But good? No.

It was, however, extremely awesome. Three sisters stand to inherit land and a motel from a grandfather they had been told was long since dead, after he’s murdered during a moral dispute. They gather up their skintight clothes, their slutty friends and frat-boy dates, and head off to check out the inheritance and decide whether to sell it. If it wasn’t for the inbred locals, this would probably have been porn instead of horror. The acting quality and the looks of the cast both bear this out. All of which is basically my point about the awesome: hilarity ensued at every point. The lines were funny on purpose almost as often as they were due to the acting failures, the slasher-style chase scenes had to have been intentional parody, and the foreboding “But is it really over?” finale was probably populated with the actors who hadn’t quite been skilled enough at their auditions to get into the real movie.

I think I’ve long since been established as a person who can appreciate a bad movie, if it’s done the right way. If you’re like that sometimes, this should be on your short list of rental gold. (Or, I guess it’ll still be in a theater near you sometime next week, maybe.)