I hit up Hulu, Prime, and even Crackle for my latest movie marathon, so let’s get right into them.
BLACK WATER: ABYSS (2020)
The director of Black Water is back for the sequel—a Crackle exclusive.
The first time around it was a croc holding a group of people captive in a tree. This time the setting is an underground cavern pool.
You come to these types of movies for the cheap thrills, so don’t be surprised that every moment of this film, right down to the stupid mistakes made by characters as well as the plot twist, is completely predictable.
The main guy is hot, the croc is smartly shown very little beyond quick flashes, and the suspense and claustrophobia are suffocating. And the muddy underwater footage just makes it all the more unnerving.
ALONE (2020)
In the tradition of movies like The Hitcher and Road Games, this film has a young widow going on a road trip and quickly being shadowed by a guy in a black SUV.
From the very start, the film establishes a sense of dread as this guy pops up at every rest stop she hits, and once the chase starts, it doesn’t let up.
The actor playing the psycho gives a fantastically unnerving performance.
The fact that the main girl tries to always stay one step ahead of him, putting herself in precarious predicaments in the process, will definitely keep you on the edge of your seat. Even some seemingly cliché situations take unexpected turns.
Most importantly, the final battle to the death rox.
REBORN (2018)
The director of the film The Last Horror Movie, which is surprisingly never mentioned at all on horror social media, brings us a simple little sci-fi horror thriller with a familiar cast.
Chaz Bono, notably good in the few small parts he’s given in movies, plays a mortician that witnesses a stillborn infant come back to life as a result of an electrical accident.
Sixteen years later, that baby is a young woman who can control electricity with her mind. She sets out to find her birth mother, using her powers to take down anyone who gets in her way.
Meanwhile, horror queen Barbara Crampton plays an actress struggling to overcome the loss of her child when she was younger. Uh-oh. So her agent, played by Rae Dawn Chong, sets her on a course to finding closure.
Michael Pare is the detective on the case when people start turning up dead and all (electrically charged) roads lead to Crampton.
There are some suspenseful moments, and the film moves at a good pace (with a running time of only 75 minutes), and the main girl playing the electrified daughter is freaky good as a lost soul with deadly powers. There are also some fun kills along the way. And quite honestly, despite being a sci-fi/horror b movie, the storyline is quite tragic.
My only real issue is a moment near the end of the film when the main girl seems to not only have the power to control electric with her mind, but suddenly has superpowers. It’s a nagging distraction during the denouement of the film.
POSSESSOR (2020)
Possessor makes me think David Cronenberg’s son watched nothing but his father’s films growing up and finally made one of his own. In other words, if you love Cronenberg, you’ll probably get into this wordy sci-fi drama from his son.
The story is about a female assassin whose mind can be harvested and implanted into ordinary, everyday people to commit murders. All she has to do when she’s done doing a hit job is commit suicide to return to herself.
Most of the focus is on her time as a gorgeous man (who shows wiener because naturally it’s the first thing she checks out), and his relationship with his fiancé—causing this film to dabble in gender identity exploration. While she’s waiting for the right moment to do her hit, she begins to experience distressing flashes of crossover between her reality and the time she spends in the heads of others.
It’s very much a character study, but the kill scenes are fantastically gory and brutal, and as her reality and those of the bodies she inhabits begin to blend and the lines blur, things get quite freaky and quite Cronenberg.
