jansell-85537

I wanted to love this movie. It has a fantastic cast and going into it I had really high hopes. What you get is a movie that could have been really great, but in the end was poorly executed. What will likely be the draw for most is the animal attack aspect. Survival horror... man vs nature. It's present, but they decided to take the Jaws approach here. A few people fall prey to the wildlife but the events are completely left to your imagination. I felt like they fell flat in that department in a big way. I wasn't looking for a gore fest, but you have almost ZERO animal human interaction here. The initial attack was a shock to me, but not in a good way... the way it was done. Very ambiguous. You see the characters and they are fine. When we're brought back to the scene after a cut to other characters, the attack has already taken place seemingly some time ago. I just wasn't a fan of how it all went down. Some characters do absolutely ridiculous things that make no sense. There's at least one huge continuity issue. Then there's an almost ridiculous spiritual undertone to this that I also felt was poorly executed. One of the main characters is dealing with a crisis of faith and he makes what I feel are some ridiculous choices that are supposed to be faith based. I feel like the writer or director has the notion that having faith negates the ability to reason. Indeed I've known some people like this, but it's not the rule. The kind of people who don't lock their door because God's looking out for them. Inevitably they're burglarized or worse. God gave you the ability to reason and a lock to keep people out 🤷‍♂️ I digress... This could have been a good film especially with the main cast. Unfortunately it wasn't, and for numerous reasons.

Well, I have been looking forward to this film since I heard about it. I'm a fan of Andrew Traucki and his style. I love his first Black Water film, as well as The Reef, and I was expecting something more in line with those titles. And this is still within the survival horror genre, but it's a far cry from those earlier films. One of the things I love about Traucki is the use of live animals instead of CGI. There was some of that used in this, but it didn't translate well, and I do believe there were some dodgy CGI shots mixed in as well. Maybe having this take place in a cave system just complicated things a little, I don't know, but a lot of the croc shots weren't as well executed as the ones from the original. There were a couple of great moments where the real croc footage shined, but not many. The acting wasn't awful, but the story was a little boring. Overall the story just wasn't as believable. This was more of a typical B-movie horror type of film whereas I felt his earlier films kind of transcended that status. The earlier films were very believable, and had a level of realism to them you rarely see in this genre, mainly because of the use of actual animal footage. Bad CGI and poor writing can pull the viewer out of the experience. The idea had great potential, but I felt this film missed its mark partially for those reasons and didn't live up to the original film.