Review of Black Water (2008) by Gimly M — 25 Nov 2013

Black Water never stood a chance of coming off better than Rogue in my eyes, but that's more my being a prick full of preconceived ideas than the fault of the film.

Black Water's another human-munching croc movie, which we are of course in no short supply of. What I like about Black Water is that even though it's not about a giant croc like Rogue, Primeval, the Lake Placid series or Crocodile, it gets massive props for taking the route of Maneater and using a genuine fucking beast in the film. A real crocodile goes wondering around and eating people? Way crazier than CGI or a rubber puppet.

It's clear that Andrew Traucki and David Nerlich (directors) along with whomever the other kids behind Black Water might have been were severely lacking in the funds department, so they rely on suspense more than anything, sometimes painfully so. Suspense is my favourite type of horror, I'm one of those few people who thinks that the longer it takes to say something the better (in films only mind you, not IRL). Black Water comes dangerously close to crossing the line with me and ending up boring, but misses it by the narrowest of margins and comes back in line with some great jump scares of the laugh-out-loud kind and plenty of blood. Though I doubt they could've gotten any more than the 89 minutes running length out of it than they did.

Yet another one we've brought out that insists on sticking to the "Based on true events" claim. Sure go on, maybe it works and you'll earn a little extra lolly, but I could make any film set anywhere with any amount of people doing anything I wanted and then put a crocodile in it and say "Oh, it's based on a true story, 'cause there's a crocodile in it, and in real life, crocodiles exit, so yeah...".

Exhibiting precisely zero naked teenage girls running around screaming was quite a nice change of pace, making the film pleasurable in a "no cheese" kind of way. I like the way that both Black Water and Rogue focus more on the idea of a mostly unseen predator picking people off while the people are at one another's throats to be much more provocative than the stupendously lame events of one-by-one death in Lake Placid and Mega Shark VS Crocosaurus.

Black Water might not be for everyone, but it stands quite loftily somewhere in the upper-middle amongst all the other Monster Movies and Creature Features out there, as one of the few serious ones that's still to some extent genuinely enjoyable.

62%.

-Gimly.