What a croc.
That’s a more suitable and truthful title for BLACK WATER: ABYSS. Or maybe Black Water: Abysmal.
An abyss is fancy word for a pit. Nothing fancy here, it’s the pits.
This tired retread of ropy tropes is a sad, sick and sorry excuse of a movie, one of the excuses presumably being the croc ate their script. Although any reptile that chomped on any morsel of this scenario would, no doubt, succumb to scriptacemia.
A quartet of friends decide to explore a remote, uncharted cave system in Far North Queensland. Are they out of their FNQ minds? Given only a small window to investigate before a tropical storm hits, the friends abseil into the mouth of the cave. Unbeknownst to them, they are also descending into the mouth of a monster crocodile.
The storm traps them in the cave and they soon find out the dank air and rising waters are the least of their worries. They’re trapped in the den of a vicious and hungry crocodile and a script with more plot holes than a cemetery. As danger mounts, long-kept secrets emerge in this frantic fight for survival.
Sorry, did I say frantic? The pace of this picture is that of a sea slug, so strike frantic for dead calm. And how can the water rise with so many plot holes?
There’s an allotted 98 minutes for this game of “then there were none” which is way too long for what passes as a screenplay to sustain. The quartet is made up of two heterosexual couples. One of them is Victor, a sickly, chemo affected cancer patient in remission. His partner has been having coitus with the other male of the party and has become pregnant.
In the culling strategy, the cuckold is the first to be chomped by the croc and Victor becomes the spoils. The croc’s reticence to attack the females may be because their mouths are wide and full of teeth, so the croc may figure that would be cannibalism.
Cinematographer Damien Beebe is the only person to come out unscathed from this dire crocodile tale, his camera work remarkable, a symptom of genius the film fails to succumb to.
BLACK WATER: ABYSS has limited theatrical release on August 6
BLACK WATER: ABYSS will be released on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital from SEPTEMBER 23,
with an early digital release to purchase from SEPTEMBER 16