Terror at Blood Fart Lake (2009)

One of the things that changed about Sunday “Bad” Movies since I cut back on how often I write has been the way I find movies. I used to schedule out the posts. I had a whole Word file made with a schedule of what movie would be what week. I planned out the spooky movies for October, the Christmas movies for December, a New Year’s movie, a Valentine’s movie, an Easter movie, and movies that tied into things coming out around those times. It was decent work, but worth it for the way I was writing at the time.

Things are a little freer now. I don’t write these posts quite as often as I used to. I didn’t even hit twenty Sunday “Bad” Movies posts in 2023. That opened up the scheduling. There is no set time for when any given post will go up. Therefore, I don’t need to closely schedule what I’m going to watch. I can’t put four posts between Halloween and December if I don’t know that I’ll get them up in time before I switching to Christmas movies. I kind of just choose movies as I go now.

That’s how I ended up writing this post, about a little movie called Terror at Blood Fart Lake. I didn’t know it existed until I turned it on. You know the nights. You’re scrolling through a streaming service. It could be Netflix, Paramount+, Disney+, or Tubi. For me, it was Amazon Prime, though I know now that the movie is also on Tubi. You’re going from movie to movie to movie, trying to find something that speaks to you. Then one of the pictures or titles pops up. Something clicks. You know that’s the right choice. You throw it on. That’s why I watched Terror at Blood Fart Lake, and now I’m writing about it because it was a perfect fit for this blog.

Terror at Blood Fart Lake was a minimal budget slasher movie. When I say minimal budget, I mean the budget was so low the movie was produced by Low Budget Pictures. That isn’t a joke. That was a production company on the movie. There were six friends who travelled to a lakeside cabin for a fun weekend, only to have that weekend end in death and mayhem. With maybe a fart or two, including a shart and a blood fart. The name was accurate.

Two things tend to stand out when watching a horror movie that doesn’t have a budget. One is the effects work. Minimal budget horror movies sometimes try harder with the effects. The filmmaker might know someone with a practical effects background. They might have that background themselves. The movie then becomes a vehicle to highlight the effects work they do, in the hopes of somehow getting recognized for their talents. The other thing is a reliance, maybe even over-reliance, on jokes. The filmmaker might recognize their own deficiencies in movie making talent. It might be the budget that holds them back. It might be a lack of experience. They infuse the script with extra jokes to try and make the movie a little more fun, since what happens on screen might not be of the highest quality.

Terror at Blood Fart Lake fell into that second camp a little more than it did the first. There were a few effects, to be sure, but none of them were all that amazing to look at. The only one that really stuck with me was a cob of corn being shoved up a guy’s butt and coming out his front like a hard penis. But that was just a cob of corn with red food dye on it or something. It wasn’t anything special. The comedy was where the movie dug in. It was going to rely heavily on the jokes between the characters. Or the comedy of corn penises.

That makes sense. Look at the name. Terror at Blood Fart Lake. If you didn’t go in expecting crude humour, I don’t know how that got past you. The title was exactly that sense of humour. It wasn’t hiding anything. In fact, it was spelling it out for you. A weekend away at the lake, and there was a major blood fart. The movie was the title. The title was the movie.

The humour in Terror at Blood Fart Lake wasn’t all that good, though. It ended up hurting the overall quality of the film. The characters became caricatures, rather than real people. They weren’t even standard slasher archetypes that played well off each other. The character types were odd, making it difficult to fully connect with them. One character was a larger woman who continuously spoke about how wet her vagina was. Another character was a woman who acted like a star system actress of the early talkies era. There was a ridiculous redneck type, and the guy who was awkward with any woman he came across. Oh, and there was the guy who spoke like the most stereotypical Italian from Jersey who wanted nothing more than to say “gabagool.” All the characters had heightened personalities, which felt like it might have been fun on set but didn’t fully come through as fun on screen.

None of this means I disliked Terror at Blood Fart Lake. It definitely had problems in the humour department. Yet there was still some sort of quality that made it watchable. The fun that everyone clearly had making the movie made me care about what was going on. I cared despite the quality of the script. I cared despite the quality of their possible and probable improv on set. I cared because the people making it had a good time making it. Terror at Blood Fart Lake never lost me. And, as soon as I discovered there was a sequel, I knew it would go onto my list of movies to watch. Not for this blog, but because I wanted to see it.

I’m going to get a little more… Honest wouldn’t be the right word because I always try to be honest in my posts… Transparent might be better. The last year or two of weekly posts had me burned out. I was going through the motions, week after week after week. I felt like my heart wasn’t in it anymore. I needed a break. That’s why I stopped posting on a weekly basis. That’s why it can sometimes be a month, maybe two months between posts now. It wasn’t necessarily the quality of the movies. I still adore bad movies and still stand by the fact that you can learn more from mistakes than perfection. Everyone makes mistakes and growth involves using those mistakes to improve the next time. But something had disappeared. That spark.

You might have seen that when I was writing about things like Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever, Rapture-Palooza, or Cold Vengeance. Maybe you couldn’t. I don’t know how well I hid my waning interest. All I know is that writing these posts felt more like a chore than fun. It felt like I was doing it to do it, instead of doing it because I enjoyed it. I had to change things to get rid of that feeling.

I started another blog. I wrote about some different things. I wrote about television. I wrote about hockey. I wrote about Bubly sparkling water. And I wrote about me. I wrote about myself in a way that I hadn’t done in forever. It wasn’t even that deep. I shifted things from “what does this mean” to “what does this mean to me.” I gave myself time to write. Not everything had to be immediate. Not everything was confined to one topic. I gave myself some freedom.

That freedom translated over to Sunday “Bad” Movies when I started making these posts again. It might not have been as much of the “how do I feel about this?” as it was back to the normal posts for this blog. However, I had the freedom of watching whatever movie I felt like watching. I started going with the flow. I don’t post every Sunday. Things are calmer. Things are less regimented. It feels fun to write for this blog again.

Terror at Blood Fart Lake is a perfect encapsulation of that. I didn’t have the movie scheduled. I didn’t know about it until mere minutes before watching it. It wasn’t even on my radar. I’ve been working on this post for a while now. I’m going at a pace that feels comfortable with me. It’s freeing.

I don’t really have a proper way to end this post. I got into that last little tangent without a real idea of how to end things. This is going to feel jarring, no matter how things end now. So, let me just say, if you enjoy something, do whatever it takes to keep enjoying it. Unless it’s illegal. Don’t do illegal stuff that could harm yourself or others. That’s not cool.

I have a few quick notes before this post is wrapped up:

• Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever, Rapture-Palooza, and Cold Vengeance were all mentioned in this post.
• Nichole LaRoche was in Terror at Blood Fart Lake. She had a bit role in Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. She was the only returning performer.
• Have you seen Terror at Blood Fart Lake? Have you heard of Terror at Blood Fart Lake? Would you ever watch a movie called Terror at Blood Fart Lake? Let me know in the comments, or contact me on Bluesky or Threads.
• If there’s a movie you think I should check out for Sunday “Bad” Movies, drop it on Bluesky, Threads, or in the comments.
• The next post shouldn’t take too long to get posted. I haven’t really written it yet, but I know exactly what I’m going to write about the movie. What movie? I checked out something called Pony Express Rider. You’ll have to read the post to find out what it was. See you soon.