Cobweb

I enjoy horror movie cliches. I wouldn’t be able to watch as many horror movies as I do if I didn’t. For example, most horror movies have at least one scene where a door emits an agonizing squeak while opening slowly. Just like the light that stops working at the worst possible moment, the creaky door moment is a staple of horror movies. These cliches and horror movies go together like hands and gloves, bacon and eggs or Michael Myers and Halloween. Even though I can sense when a creaky door is about to make an appearance, I always appreciate when a movie does them correctly. The problem I had with Cobweb isn’t that it has at least a half-dozen creaky door scenes, but that none of them had any effect on me. Even worse is that I had the same reaction to every other scary element in this movie: none.

In addition to the door situation, Cobweb trots out at least a dozen other well-worn horror movie cliches in an effort to make its thin story compelling. The movie is about a kid named Peter (Woody Norman), a quiet loner who is bullied regularly at school. He has a big shock of hair and expressive eyes that grow wide whenever something scary happens. One night, he hears thumping noises behind a wall in his bedroom. He mentions this to his mother Carol (Lizzy Caplan), who doesn’t believe him and tells him that he has an overly active imagination. Over subsequent nights, the noises are followed by the plaintive voice of a young girl who tells Peter she wants to be his friend. Then she asks Peter to help her escape from behind the wall.

Adding texture to Peter’s home life are his peculiar parents. Carol speaks with odd verbal affectations that seem rooted in the early Twentieth Century. Peter’s father Mark (Antony Starr) is a fearful presence whenever he’s home. When he’s not lording over his wife and son, he indulges in a belittling sense of humor that he finds hilarious. Carol and Peter are always on their guard around him, probably because they think he’ll hit them for even a minor transgression. (Starr’s Homelander character on Prime’s The Boys is also unpredictable and prone to violent outbursts.)

As far as horror movie setups go, Cobweb is constructed with basic building blocks. It’s a story about a damaged kid with condescending parents and no friends, who is terrorized at night by something lurking in the dark, all while living in a house filled with creaky doors that open on their own. This scenario describes any number of horror movies, and I mention a few in my analysis below. The issue with Cobweb isn’t that it’s familiar, but that everything the movie does is executed so listlessly that even the tried-and-true horror movie elements fail to move the needle.

Because the plot of Cobweb isn’t much to speak of, I suspect that the story was polished to include quirky things intended to hold our interest. Peter’s parents refuse to celebrate Halloween because a trick-or-treater went missing several years ago. Outside of school, Peter is confined to the inside of the house, and he bounces a ball off his bedroom walls to pass the time. As I mentioned above, Carol and Mark express themselves with turns of phrase that would have sounded antiquated Fifty years ago. And to top things off, Mark is a pumpkin farmer, with a pumpkin patch behind the family’s house. There’s nothing wrong with any of these elements per se. However, what did make me frustrated is how none of this stuff has anything to do with the story at hand. They’re the equivalent of salt added to a bland meal.

The action in Cobweb picks up a bit when Peter paints a picture representing his late night encounters at school. His substitute teacher Miss Devine (Cleopatra Coleman) goes to Peter’s home to bring it to his mother’s attention. Carol brushes it off and sends Devine on her way, then scolds Peter for bringing undo attention to their family. She also keeps the incident from Mark, because she doesn’t want it to trigger his temper. When Mark does learn what Peter did, he forces Peter to spend the night in a dark basement filled with cobwebs. (I think every horror movie is required to have a basement like this one.)

While The Girl Behind The Wall has been gaining Peter’s trust, she’s also been coaching him on how to deal with his schoolyard bully. She tells Peter to stand up for himself and push back. Unfortunately, Peter takes her advice a bit too literally and his actions lead to him being expelled from school. I was surprised by this, because I assumed he would only be suspended. Getting expelled for his first incident–a direct response to being bullied–seemed harsh. Everyone at school has seen Peter’s bloody face and knows who has it out for him.

Although this turn of events is bad for Peter, it’s good for The Girl, who continually tells him things to get him on her side. Without giving anything away, Carol and Mark are very bad parents who have done very bad things. After the Girl lets Peter in on his family’s deep, dark family secret, he subdues them and helps her escape from the wall. This, of course, does not turn out well like Peter expected. After operating in low gear for most of the story, the movie hits the accelerator at the very end. There’s a bloody confrontation with some home invaders, shots of The Girl crawling on walls, a stopover in a ridiculously huge subterranean layer and a heroic rescue. The ending emphatically states “this is not over”, although I doubt a sequel will be forthcoming. (I could be wrong. The Boy got a sequel, after all.)

In looking for things that I appreciated in Cobweb, the list I came up with was pitifully small. Philip Lozano’s cinematography is the best part of the movie by far. Because of the movie’s slow pace, I was able to appreciate how beautiful everything was framed, especially the nighttime scenes. Antony Starr and Lizzy Caplan bring an oddball sensibility to their threadbare characters. I liked that Peter’s home looks exactly how a modern haunted house should look. There’s one mildly disturbing dream sequence. And that’s all I could come up with.

Cobweb does have a few mild jump-scares at the very end. In the absence of plot and character development, the movie tries very hard to keep things interesting with dark atmospherics and quirky behavior, but the results are underwhelming. The movie feels cobbled together with pieces lifted from much better movies, with no effort made to get them fit together in a cohesive or logical way. The quirky elements that made the movie mildly interesting in the beginning are completely forgotten by the time the silly monster mayhem takes over at the end.

Speaking of which, the CGI used to depict the monster’s face was laughably bad. Director Samuel Bodin seems to know this and kept it hidden until the very end. He would have been better off using simple makeup and prosthetics to get the point across.

Cobweb is as thin as its title suggests, a tired amalgamation of ideas lifted from far better movies. Even its generous usage of standard horror cliches fall flat. For a better version of the same thing, see Come Play instead. Not recommended.

Analysis

One of these days, someone is going to make a horror movie parody about characters who are tormented day and night by creaky doors. It should be called The Creaking Door, or The Door that Creaked.

Guess that Movie

Because Cobweb is constructed from very familiar horror movie themes, I was constantly reminded of similar films. Here’s a short list I came up with:

The Boogeyman. A monster terrorizes children at night. Their father doesn’t believe them.

Antlers. A teacher notices one of her students has injuries and suspects child abuse. When she visits the student’s home, she discovers that not only are his parents monsters (figuratively speaking), but that the boy is being threatened by an actual monster as well.

Come Play. A monster who befriends a boy in order to gain access to the outside world.

The Boy. A child who was forced to live in the walls who becomes a monster.

Let The Right One In. Boy at the center of the plot is frequently bullied at school. He befriends a monster who says she can protect him. The movie concludes with the monster exacting bloody revenge on the boy’s tormentors.

The Strangers. A group of violent home invaders wear silly masks.

Barbarian. A hideous daughter is confined to living in an enormous underground lair.

Strangely enough, the backstory of The Girl felt directly lifted from the preamble in Batman Returns. In both movies, parents are ashamed of their deformed monster of a child and hide it from the rest of the world.

An Alternate Ending

The ending of Cobweb frustrated in the same way as The Boy. In Cobweb, The Girl claims that she was unfairly imprisoned by her parents just because she was ugly. The movie implies that The Girl killed the trick-or-treater, but bothers to show or explain what actually happened..

Instead of revealing that The Girl is a hideous monster and having her go on a bloody rampage in the end, I would have preferred if Peter and his long-lost sister escaped and tried to find their way in the real world. That way, the sympathy the movie built up for The Girl would have been rewarded in some way, instead of feeling like a dull bait-and-switch.

Odd and Ends

The more I thought about Cobweb, the more I wondered if parts of the script were cut out to keep the movie’s run time down to an hour and a half.

Why does Peter’s father have a pumpkin patch?

The Girl is jealous of Peter’s life, which mostly consists of being tormented at school and this?

Who has orange juice with dinner?

Sorry, but any kid who takes a pumpkin with him to the schoolyard should expect it to be destroyed.

How does Peter’s teacher, or any other adult at the school, not notice his injured face? Later, when the principal confronts Devine about her impromptu home visit, she says that she hasn’t seen any sign of bruises.