31 Nights of Halloween Horror - Black Water: Abyss

Black Water: Abyss
98 mins.
Dir. Andrew Traucki
2020/Australia




When I say Halloween, you think of pumpkins, ghosts, black cats, bats, witches and crocodiles.  Apparently this film is a sequel to Black Water.  Never heard or seen Black Water?  Don't worry about it, me neither, though I guess it was good enough to earn a sequel.  Tonight we head to the Northern Territory in Australia and learn about things we should not do.

Things not to do
    1) Go to the Northern Territory in Australia
    2) Go into an unexplored cave
    3) Go into the water of an unexplored cave

That is exactly what the characters of Black Water: Abyss do.  Seeing crocodiles on your way to said unexplored cave, one can only assume these things are everywhere.  Despite all that, five friends enter a cave and ultimately can't find a way out.  The cave is filled with water and because of an overflowed river (or enter any other reason you want) the water level in the cave is rising.  Oh, and there is a hungry crocodile in the water somewhere waiting to pick them off, one by one.  Most of this movie is spent trying to find a way out of the cave and it really slows down the pacing.  Anytime someone goes in the water, willingly or unwillingly, you can pretty much expect the crocodile to be there, so the tension isn't too high because everything you expect to happen, pretty much does on que.


People seemed to like last year's Crawl, though I can't understand why.  For a movie about alligators eating people, I kind of wanted to see, well...more alligators eating people.  And I have to say, there is a good chance you are going to bleed out and be severely damaged having being bit by an alligator and not be able to still to run around.  Not so much in Crawl though, guess those alligators had rubber teeth.

But I digress, Black Water: Abyss is what we are talking about here.  Is it a giant crocodile in this movie?  No I don't think so, I assume it is regular size.  Though having never been face to face with one in the water, I am going to guess even the smallest crocodile seems too big.  Does the croc have a vendetta against stupid people who explore unknown caves?  No, I think he is just hungry.  Though I am no herpetologist (look it up), I would suspect that after a croc eats one person their appetite is sedated and they don't keep on looking to over eat, but I could be wrong.  Regardless of all that, the movie mostly takes place in a cave, it's dark, the water is murky, so none of the croc attack scenes are really very visible and there is no real excessive croc chomping going on.  Despite trying to throw in a relationship gone awry subplot, there is really too much of nothing happening and too much predictability to really get excited about this one.

Let's not kid ourselves here, when it comes to making killer monster movies, we want to see killer monsters.  Not people whining about their relationship and wah, wah, wah.  Let's get some good clean gut munching going on.  Until that happens, you are better off sticking with Chocodiles.






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