Lost Lake (2005) from Tuna

Lost Lake came about because the husband and wife writing team of Anthony and Christina Adams were at a Sierra lake, and found a rock that someone had inscribed with very serious and emotional poetry. When they found that it had been written exactly thirty years earlier to the day, they felt the urge to come up with a script to explain it.

The film begins in a remote ski lodge. Angel Boris has been having sex with someone, and an older guest is not happy with his weekend ... then an earthquake triggers an avalanche.

Cut to two weeks before.

Angel Boris has a job reciting poetry and serving latte at a coffee house, and decides to move on. She takes a job as maid and girl Friday at the ski lodge. The lodge is run by an old hippie (Mark Collie), and a young former Olympic skier (Michael McLafferty). Guests include the Olympian skier's estranged half brother, who is an extreme skier (Frayne Rosanoff), and the rich older professor with his latest young grad student conquest (Daisy McCrackin). The professor pays generously for his yearly visits -- enough to keep the old lodge solvent.

The major plot developments include a fifteen second sex scene between the professor and his tootsie - who eventually ends abandoning the old geezer in favor of the extreme skier, and a budding relationship between Angel Boris and the Olympian. We slowly learn that there is some history between the old hippie and the parents of the two skiers, and somehow Angel Boris and her supernatural visions are tangled up in the mix. We come full circle to the opening avalanche, and then the resolution phase.

The straight-to-vid film is not perfect. The story is muddled, the plot can be a little hard to follow, and it tries to encompass too many genres. At best, this this film can be described as uneven, yet I watched it start to finish, without interruptions or fast forwarding. There are many bright spots. The action features some great extreme skiing, including some great stunt work of bad skiing from the professor's character. We get long lingering looks at Angel Boris's breasts and buns, there are beautiful scenics, a good fight or two, and my personal favorite scene, when McCracken gets her bare butt stuck to a brass plaque.

In the final weighing of films which are less than perfectly written, the balance is inevitably tipped by whether or not you like the characters, and I did.