‘Cobweb’ movie review: Samuel Bodin’s laughably bad half-baked horror
Most of the scary monsters, ghouls and creatures that live rent-free inside our minds have already been put on the silver screen, to the displeasure of many. Stephen King’s It ticked off creepy clowns and Steven Spielberg covered both sharks and thalassophobia with 1975’s Jaws, but few have taken on the task of spiders, with Samuel Bodin’s latest low-budget horror flick Cobweb being the latest movie to capitalise on the creepy crawlies.
Yet, fans hoping to terrify their other halves with some eight-legged freaks will be severely disappointed, as Cobweb is as much about arachnids as Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange is about a citrus fruit that can tell the time. Using spiders sparingly and with little rhyme or reason, director Samuel Bodin instead falls back on predictable genre tropes that do nothing to rouse any interest.
The drama all centres around Peter (Woody Norman), an eight-year-old boy who is haunted by the repeated knocking on his bedroom wall. Shouting for his parents on a nightly basis, his domineering father, Mark (Antony Star) and unstable mother, Carol (Lizzy Caplan), hold a strange secret, refusing to acknowledge the presence of the noise, even when it begins to produce physical consequences.
It should be said off the bat that Cobweb is a baffling piece of cinema, holding just about as much intrigue as the pesky spider fibre that’s clinging to the shadowy corners of a suburban kitchen. Poorly constructed from start to finish, the film weaves around several tarantula-sized plotholes, refusing to address humungous inconsistencies in the lead cast of characters whilst dodging narrative faults that simply don’t make sense.
Where modern horror is currently thriving, with such novel films as the Philippou brothers’ Talk to Me, Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool and Michelle Garza Cervera’s Huesera: The Bone Woman, Cobweb is a somewhat disheartening reminder that the interest of studios remains in the gutter of the genre. Remarkably half-baked, Bodin’s film barely seems like an adequate concept, with even the supposedly ‘spectacular’ CGI villain feeling unfinished.
Usually, such films would only be able to attract a small handful of Hollywood hopefuls, yet Cobweb, perhaps due to the bizarre producer partnership of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, was able to magnetise The Boys favourite Antony Starr and indie darling Lizzy Caplan. Whilst the former is utterly wasted, reduced to being an ‘angry dad’, Caplan is the film’s brightest light, finding the terror in a screenplay that is about as scary as a young child in a Minions mask.
With an exciting filmography to date, it’s surprising that director Samuel Bodin couldn’t produce more quality here, even if there are morsels of quality flicked throughout in the odd neat scene or clever shot. The problem, more evidently, is the screenplay from Chris Thomas Devlin, who also penned the disastrous Netflix sequel Texas Chainsaw Massacre, giving the film no skeleton at all from which to grow and thrive.
In the leadup to the spookiest month of the year, we sincerely hope that the rest of Hollywood has some better frights lined up for us. Help us, The Exorcist: Believer, you’re our only hope.
