Themes: Writer's Life, Woman In Jeopardy, Serial Killers
Main Cast: Judd Nelson, Hedy Burress, Michael Weatherly
Release Year: 2000
Run Time: 95 minutes
Plot
A writer's deadly secret is about to rise to the surface in this made-for-TV suspense thriller. Stanley Caldwell (Judd Nelson) is a screenwriter working on a story for a suspense film about a lunatic who kidnaps and murders young women. However, Stanley's research methods are more than a bit unusual -- he actually does kidnap women, and once he's learned as much as he thinks he can from them, he disposes of their bodies by drowning them in a nearby lake. Stanley's buddies who work at a special effects company don't suspect anything could be wrong, nor does the local sheriff Boone Preston (Michael Weatherly), but when Stanley snatches Mallory (Hedy Burress), a pretty but iron-willed teenager, he may have finally found a victim who can outwit him and put a stop to his twisted game. Cabin by the Lake was produced and first aired by the USA cable network. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Cabin by the Lake is a black comedy/horrorTV movie released in 2000. It tells the story of Stanley, played by Judd Nelson, a script writer who begins killing girls for research for a movie he is writing, where the villain does the same thing.
Synopsis
The movie takes place in Summit Lake, where Stanley is renting a cabin to write a script for a new movie where a killer drowns young girls and keeps them underwater as a macabre garden. Incidentally, that is exactly what Stanley is doing. The last girl he captures, Mallory, is rescued right after Stanley drops her in the water by his friends, a police officer named Boone and a couple who own a movie special-effects shop nearby. Mallory then gives the idea to make a plaster-mold of herself, with a camera as an eye, to catch the killer when he returns to his garden. When Stanley returns to the bodies, he soon discovers the ploy, and quickly escapes, and due to wearing a scuba mask, his identity remains unknown.
Mallory, assuming herself safe, stays at a hotel room for the night, but is again captured by Stanley while in the bathtub. The whole process starts over as he prepares to again attempt to drown her, but complications arise when Stanley's agent Regan, a boisterous woman, and the director to the film he is writing, arrives at the cabin unexpectedly. He kills the director with a cleaver, then imprisons Regan with Mallory. He then takes them both to the lake to drown them, but Boone and the other police dive and quickly release Mallory, while Stanley and Regan are trapped underwater. Snagged by a rope around his leg, he is assumed dead. Mallory tries to recover from the experience, while still having visions of his face in the water. Regan's body is recovered, but Stanley's has disappeared.
The last scene has a person talking to a new agent about a movie in which a killer buries his victims alive. The agent asks the person how the person feels as they're buried alive. The camera shows the person to be Stanley with a new look, as he says "I'm still doing the research."
Trivia
The movie in the film is initially titled "Garden of Flesh," but in a meeting with the director, he wants it to be a black comedy (to Stanley's disapproval) and it is later renamed "Cabin by the Lake," therefore having a "movie-within-a-movie" effect.
