Prime Time: Cobweb (2023)

You have to be careful when working with horror material. Sometimes meeting expectations and delivering predictable plot beats becomes part of the fun. Sometimes you need to subvert things. It all depends on what you offer up around the most familiar elements. Cobweb, sadly, doesn’t offer up anything that feels truly worth your time. 

Written by Chris Thomas Devlin, who has one other writing credit so far (one of the writers who served up Texas Chainsaw Massacre), this is a fairly standard tale of some over-protective/maybe harmful parents (played by Lizzy Caplan and Antony Starr) and a young child (Woody Norman) who starts to feel the presence of someone else living in the walls of his home. There’s a concerned teacher (played by Cleopatra Coleman), a young bully (Luke Busey) who soon moves from the terrorizer to the terrorized, and a third act that becomes disappointingly unambiguous and underwhelming when you realise the squandered potential of the premise.

While director Samuel Bodin, making their feature debut, has a decent eye, they don’t have the ability to elevate scenes in a way that can help to distract from the fairly weak script. Devlin fills the runtime with tired dialogue and one ridiculous contrivance after another. I remember being excited to check this out last year, and then my enthusiasm started to wane as I kept seeing the advertising for it and feeling as if it had nothing new to offer. I could have been wrong, sometimes the trailers and marketing do hold back a surprise or two, but it turns out that I was right. And things are made worse by both Devlin and Bodin wasting the cast.

I am a huge fan of both Caplan and Starr, which made this an even more frustrating viewing experience. Both are asked to act quite ridiculously, because anyone acting normally would end the movie within minutes. Part of me wanted more screentime for them, part of me was glad they didn’t have to carry the whole film on their shoulders. That task goes to young Norman, who is okay, I guess, but has to overdo the nervy and fragile core of his character, which is his entire personality for the duration of the movie. Coleman comes out of this best, playing the standard caring adult who investigates further when she suspects something is amiss. 

The more I think about Cobweb, the less inclined I am to compliment it. I was angry as the end credits rolled. There are positives though. It has some eye-catching visuals, making good use of the shadows and darkness in the finale. There’s also . . . Well, it has . . . Actually, I think that is it. Some decent visuals, two great cast members (both wasted), and a good title. The rest is bad, as bad as any other mainstream horror I can think of from the past few years.

3/10

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Netflix And Chill: Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)

I can't think of any BIG horror movie franchise that isn't a bit of a mess right now. The biggest problem seems to be that film-makers are trying to come up with ways to reinvigorate and rework concepts that outstayed their welcome many years ago. But we horror fans don't want to leave anything "dead" for too long, which is why we secretly enjoy seeing a main character not shoot a masked killer in the head.

It would be wrong to single out The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series ahead of many others. The original will always be an absolute classic, the remake was a film I thought was pretty damn great, and the wildly varying quality of the other films has allowed fans to argue over which instalment they prefer over others. I don’t know many people who would stand up for the last two movies in the series though, films that tried their best to reach new lows.

This film is not a low point in the series. Despite a troubled production, as well as a messy number of attempts at social commentary that are picked up and dropped with abandon, it’s a silly bit of gory fun. 

The plot is quite simple. There’s a Texas town that has gone to seed over the years, almost fully abandoned by now. It was once, and maybe still is, home to the infamous Leatherface. A group of youngsters arrive in the town, due to be followed by a bank rep and various investors. The town properties have been snapped up at auction and are due to be sold on at a healthy profit, but this leads to a confrontation that sets the chainsaw buzzing again.

Directed by David Blue Garcia, who took over after the initial directors left the project, and working with a script written by Chris Thomas Devlin, this is a film full of impressive moments. The first big kill is an absolute doozy, to use the technical term, while a third act set-piece stands out as a real highlight, and I mean a highlight of the whole series from the last couple of decades. The plot does what it has to do, but the focus often turns to real physical damage and limb removal. It's not even that bad when utilising a returning character from the first movie (Sally Hardesty, played this time around by Olwen Fouéré). Yes, we've seen this dynamic before, but it just feels a bit better here, perhaps due to the speed of the whole thing unfolding. Or perhaps it is just because a film can have someone basically saying "evil dies tonight" without making fifty different characters chant "evil dies tonight". The mis-steps aren't massive, they're just puzzling. A moment to skewer social media is casually crammed in to a huge gore scene, as is a moment in which someone pathetically tries to threaten Leatherface with cancellation. There's a strange anti-gun sentiment running through things, tied to one of the main characters being the survivor of a school shooting. These are interesting morsels, certainly more interesting than anything I expected to get from a TCM movie nowadays, but they're not made into anything more substantial. Maybe Garcia and co. decided, quite rightly, that it wouldn't do to stay away from any nasty kills for too long, or maybe it just shows what chaos could have been going on behind the scenes.

The cast is a decent mix, with most of the young leads doing solid work. Elsie Fisher and Sarah Yarkin play Lila and Melody, respectively, and I was especially pleased to see Fisher in a role that felt like such a departure from any previous movie work. Jacob Latimore is the charismatic leader of the group, and does well, and Nell Hudson is Ruth, the partner of Latimore's character and the person given the least to do in the movie. Fouéré keeps a straight face while heading towards her face-off against Leatherface, Moe Dunford is a local man who may be able to help save the lives of some interlopers, Alice Krige has a small, but crucial, role, and Jessica Allain is the main representative of the bank, which means every minute she survives is a pleasant surprise. Mark Burnham takes on the iconic, chainsaw-wielding, central role, and he's a strong performer, whether getting that chainsaw to start up, adjusting his latest extra layer of skin, or just manhandling people as if they were small dolls about to have their arms ripped off.

Some may dislike this, and some may hate it. I've already seen debate online about it, and a lot of fans have replied to others asking "what do you expect from a TCM movie that is the ninth in the series?" I think film fans can always expect a minimum of decent work, from script to camerawork and special effects, no matter where in the timeline a series instalment drops. And I think this delivers that. It's a fun mess, but at least it's fun. Which is more than I can say about Texas Chainsaw or Leatherface. The contrived final scene is terrible though, so be warned.

6/10

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