Three Films Make A Post: If the storm doesn't get you... they will

Crawl (2019): By now, I’ve decided the films of Alexandre Aja are a bit like those of Rob Zombie in that I’ll never like a single one of them. This one should actually be a bit of a winner: a father daughter duo trapped by a hurricane having to fight off an alligator sounds like actual claustrophobic fun. Alas, it’s an annoying father-daughter duo with exactly the father-daughter problems you’d find in a SyFy movie. Aja and/or the script also quickly get bored by having to come up with suspense scenes based on the minimalist set-up, so the one alligator soon turns into a swarm of alligators, and because Aja clearly can’t imagine not having any character to kill, we get ten minutes of alligators killing random people around our protagonists’ house. It’s really all very SyFy Original, just with a higher budget and for some reason having found its way into a cinema near me; it’s also a middling at best SyFy Original without much to recommend it or even just remember it next week.

The Black String (2018): I actually enjoyed Brian Hanson’s much more low-market film about a guy (Frankie Muniz) with a history of psychological problems either starting to suffer from a witch’s curse or losing it after a one-night stand a lot more. Hanson is really good at dragging Muniz’s experiences to the border of the ridiculous and illogical, making the viewer increasingly uncomfortable with the protagonist but also evoking sympathy and empathy for his plight, be it imagined or not, while still having him act increasingly erratic and threatening to himself and others.

Also highly commendable is how well the film fits typical tropes of Fortean High Strangeness into its plot, and how dubious and slightly cracked anyone who believes our protagonist is. It’s all highly ambiguous, until the film ends on a note that washes all ambiguity away without needing to go for a twist ending.

The Endless (2017): I liked the previous films by director/writer and sometimes actor duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead a lot, and The Endless, which tells the story of two brothers returning to the cult they grew up in – a tale that also happens to intersect with the duo’s first movie Resolution in surprising and pretty damn cool ways – is another winner. I’m particularly happy with the directors’ ability to fuse the cosmically weird, the humanly weird and the naturalistically mundane without ever letting any one perspective overwhelm the rest of the film.


The pace is leisurely, but it’s the kind of slowness that follows the need of the story the film tells and the world it takes place in – this is one of those films where every shot takes on multiple functions in world building, character building or mood building without ever making things feel too constructed or overloaded. It’s a thing of beauty, really.