Director: Danny Draven
Year: 2023
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Creature Feature; Horror/Comedy
Plot:
Traveling together for Spring Break, a group of college students rent a house on the Louisiana swamps to hang out and party for a week, but when they find one of their viral pranks has unleashed a killer CGI gator on them must try to get away from the creature alive.
Review:
Overall, this was a pretty fun short-form genre effort. The simplistic setup that shows the group coming together and arriving at the house in the middle of the swamp and going about their traditional lives involving social media sharing, sexual hookups, or just trying to make a move all allows for a cliched if still fun time getting to know everyone. This does run the risk of making the group immensely one-dimensional as they spend the majority of the film complaining about their inability to get to their followers, acting like entitled douchebags, or trying to get their unwilling friends to finally hook up in the name of trying to gain internet famous. As a whole, this setup works incredibly well to provide some solid setup for the second half here.
That part of the film provides the generally cheesy goods as this launches into the creatures' attacks with the titular creature springing up and striking the group one by one. Playing up the concept in the title by letting it spring up out of nowhere to chomp on one of the group. The suspenseful stalking scenes setting up the actual attack before getting into the wild nature of the actual attack makes for a nice combination which makes for a series of cheesy strikes here letting the patently fake-looking creature get the chance to perform some outrageous sequences to pull it off. It’s all played lightly enough to be a fun time but is still overwhelmed by the absolutely silly special effects or the wholly unrealistic effects throughout even though this is all intentional.
Overview: ***/5
A wholly effective and cheesy genre effort, this one manages to come off far better than expected with the expectedly obvious cheesiness being the main drawback to be had here. Those who appreciate this kind of cheesy genre effort, are curious about it, or are fans of the creative crew will have plenty to enjoy with this one while others that aren’t into these factors should heed caution.
Comments
Post a Comment