Within the opening minute of this movie, I knew I’d made a big damn mistake. It’s one of those movies where there instant an image hits the screen, you know you’re in bargain basement territory. And when the first shitty CGI alligator sauntered on screen, I felt like Anakin after he turned on Mace Windu, “What have I done?!?”
The Flood is basically a no budget disaster movie mixed with a creature feature. A hurricane is flooding a local jail and a small band of mercenaries break in to rescue one of the prisoners. They are followed by a handful of shitty CGI alligators.
The flick is a real rollercoaster… but not in a good way. It started with an instant half star “what have I done?” rating and then rose to 1 star… and then to 1.5 when I realized anything not involving shitty CGI alligators wasn’t too bad. Then it hit 2 stars when I realized the actors weren’t garbage… then it dropped back to 1.5 when sanity returned (and the shitty CGI alligators kept popping up to ruin the movie).
And those shitty CGI ‘gators are bad… but they aren’t as bad as the shitty CGI blood squibs and the even shittier CGI rain (how do you mess up RAIN?). Every special effect in the movie is worse than the last and the flick would have done itself a big damn service by just being a suspense thriller disaster and cutting out the creatures (and the blood squibs). I mean, if you can’t comp an actor and a shitty ‘gator into one shot convincingly, maybe don’t half a gator wrestling sequence?
But, at the same time, the director and the music score suggest this could have been a better movie. There’s some skill in a few suspenseful and dramatic sequences and the score, when it’s not being generic, can be decent. The actors aren’t the worst… they are playing walking, talking clichés, but I’ve seen those done worse.
It’s a weird one. It’s a legitimately bad to terrible movie but I thought it was going to be SO much worse. It’s possible I’m grading on a curve to even reach 1 1/2 stars… but it’s so much better than I thought it was going to be in that first minute. If only they’d ejected the shitty CGI gators, they might have possibly had something slightly less terrible.
Score: 62