Rana: The Legend of Shadow Lake (1975)

People, join me in giving a shout out to my main man Bill Rebane.

Not that I actually know him but, after seeing his films I feel that I can honestly say I know his tastes in general. As would anyone who has seen such magnum opuses (opi?) as The Alpha Incident, The Capture of Bigfoot and that MST3K fave The Giant Spider Invasion. It affects one's opinion of the motion picture as a storytelling medium when they see people viciously attacked by a furry Volkswagen Beetle with spider legs. In the same vein, it also affects a director's standing when the largest exposure his films get is when being heckled by robots.

Like any director worth his salt, though, Rebane never aimed low with his works; he tried to make the most of the materials he had at hand...it's not his fault that what he had at hand was so paltry to begin with. An unfortunate fact of directors with big ideas and small budgets is that corners must be cut and, usually, it's at the sacrifice of their art as a whole. The sad thing with a Bill Rebane film is that his stories usually matched his budgets in terms of smallness.

In the midst of his career, Rebane released a film from his home state (Wisconsin) that dealt with, as many films did in the early and mid-70s, a local legend. It didn't matter whether it was real or not. However, much like the regional effort from New Mexico, 1976's Track of the Moon Beast, the legend here is made up with such detail and intensity that it creates a mental image within the viewer which no one could possibly follow through on without a multi-million dollar budget and extensive CGI effects, both of which are a million light years from Rebane's grasp here.

Not to say that he doesn't give it the proverbial college try.

Rana: The Legend of Shadow Lake details the story of Kelly Morgan (Glenn Scherer), a man who as a youth (Brad Ellington) was told of the local legend at his local island home of a local frog god that local indians worshipped by throwing local gold into the local lake.

The discovery of a skeleton fragment with traits of a man-frog (don't ask) brings to the island a local professor (Karen McDiarmid) and her teenage niece Susan (Julie Wheaton) to study the area. Unfortunately, the legend also brings poachers out to the island to try and find that sacrificial gold of long-ago. This all draws the attention of the crazy hermit/trapper Charlie (Jerry Gregoris), who channels Gabby Hayes and takes potshots at the poachers. Through all of this, Kelly's dad (Alan Ross), a forest ranger, tries to keep the peace while assisting the professor with her work.

But soon, people start showing up dead. Is it the work of the gold-digging poachers, is it the crazy trapper...or could it be Rana?

Rebane's story is fine; as with anything else, it's all in how it's told. The dark green mossy woods and murky, foreboding waters of Wisconsin set an appropriately eerie mood. The problem is that Rebane (as director) is ill-equipped to set up a shot so that it pays off. Even the shock scenes are undermined by the fact that there is either too long an establishing shot so as to ruin the suspense or too sudden a close-up on the payoff. Many scenes also happen in slow-motion, supposedly to heighten the shock or make the suspense more agonizingly horrific.

It doesn't work.

Then there's the matter of the mood music: expectedly twangy '70s synth stuff, and what actual orchestral interludes there are end up spliced in abruptly and don't even match up with the "quality" of what came before, sound-wise and bear little to no context to the scene (one of the poachers dies to the strains of "Swan Lake" - though he is standing in the lake when he's killed, so I guess that makes sense...kinda).

Still, all of this could have been overlooked with good acting. Even decent acting. But Rebane, budget-cutter and bargain hunter that he was, could only settle for the types of actors that make local television commercials look like Strasbergian festivals of "The Method". Much of the movie centers on young Ellington, who evokes a monotone Dennis the Menace (without the Menace), right down to his striped t-shirt and dirty overalls. McDiarmid comes the closest to pulling off a performance, in spite of the fact that her character is so ill-defined that at one point we're not even sure if she's there for the gold or for the science! But even as the most colorful character in the movie, Gregoris manages to negate his own presence by growling out his lines and twisting his face into what looks like an Old West prospector mask. In fact, he acts more like a pirate than a trapper. You halfway expect him to growl out a tale about gold and treasure in the middle of....

Oh wait, he DOES do that. Well, at least that much is expected.

There's another sizable problem and that's with the monster itself. Many times the menace lies just below the green water and out of view, represented only by some air bubbles rising up to the lake's surface. Again, this is fine; it's building up suspense and forcing us to use our imaginations as to what Rana looks like. This "hiding" approach also worked in movies like Prophecy (1979) and The Giant Claw (1957), and all of these worked right up to the same point - when their respective creatures made their first appearances. After that, well.... Let me put it this way: Rebane shows an arm here, a leg or torso there, a distant shot of the creature's head bobbing around in the algae. And it''s okay until you put the pieces together. Rana itself has the appearance of The Creature from the Black Lagoon if he had been designed by Ed Wood Jr.; big bulbous yellow eyes, rubber glove hands and a wetsuit seemingly coated with tempra paint. Not exactly erasing my memories of Ricou Browning, here.

So, Rana: The Legend of Shadow Lake actually did play in theaters (in and around Wisconsin, anyway) and did no more nor less damage to the better-advertised movies of 1975 than any other regional film. One can only imagine what would have happened if Rebane actually had a budget of $1 million, actual actors and a better director than himself - and better effects, can't forget that. He may have had at least the same effect with Rana as Charles B. Pierce had with The Legend of Boggy Creek. Not that this would necessarily be a good thing, but a movie like Rana: The Legend of Shadow Lake needs all the help it can get.

One final note: I noticed on the box my copy of Rana came in that it has "Science Fiction" stamped right on the side of it, along with the artwork and everything. As a classification, I guess. Now if you can explain what Rana: The Legend of Shadow Lake has to do with sci-fi, then perhaps you are more in tune with Rebane's train of thought than anyone else besides he. Congratulations.