The Flood

Image credit: Rotten Tomatoes

The world is made up of varying tastes and conflicting preferences, and while it’s tempting to upgrade one’s opinions to a status of fact due to the amount of emotional clout you put behind it, we must remember we are here on this planet to enjoy ourselves and shape our own characters. Thus, when I badmouth a movie, it’s not an act of judgement, rebellion, or conversion: merely the thoughts of one person of no real consequence being sent into the wider world.

Friday night is becoming Dumb Eco Horror Movie Night in our household: we are finding that cuddling up on the couch with dinner and horror films starring natural predators as the villains is just a nice way to spend the evening. While we appreciate good eco horror, we also enjoy the terrible b-movie monster flicks that can be found clogging our streaming platforms. We discovered one such on Friday night: The Flood.

Louisiana is in the grips of an insane hurricane, during which a transport van filled with dangerous criminals is forced to make a stopover at the local police station to wait out the storm. Following the van is a team of crims intent on breaking out one of their men but the jailbreak takes a turn when it’s discovered that a group of large alligators have infiltrated the police station, brought in with the storm.

Con Air with gators, but nowhere near as good. That’s probably the nicest thing we can say about this hilariously dumb film. The story itself could have been quite interesting, but it seems that the (most likely) scant budget was spent on actors and computer wizardry(?). To be fair, the performances are the best part of this film. Leading lady Nickey Whelan as the sheriff that can hold her own against the ceaseless waves of toxic masculinity is very compelling to watch and Casper Van Dien as the stoic silent crim who is maybe really not a bad guy, is fascinating (however this could also be due to the forced narrative cliché of the character). He’s sort of like the Steven Buscemi in Con Air – hyped up to be super dangerous that even the other aggressively loud criminals give him a wide berth, and so of course we want to know what his deal is!

Image credit: IGN

Absolutely everything else about this movie is garbage. The story had a lot of potential but was given up on with no thought beyond ‘jailbreak gets interrupted by unbelievably persistent gators’. We don’t even get the fun of wondering what’s causing the disappearances because the villains are introduced before the story even kicks off. So, no real suspense, a completely unbelievable depiction of natural predator behaviour without even any hand-wavey science fiction to paint it with, and the gators themselves are soooo janky, shiny, and overly obviously computer generated – making them the scariest things in the film, but not for the right reasons. The flinches and winces of pain and unease that this movie does manage to inspire are not empathetic from the gore or jump scares, they’re a product of bad CGI, a plethora of cliched and pointless director’s decisions, and a script that feels like the writers just went for lunch and did not come back.

BUT, if you do enjoy watching terrible movies because that are terrible and require no real brain function to follow, then you could do worse than The Flood.

Director: Brandon Slagle, 2023

Cast: Nickey Whelan, Casper Van Dien, Louis Mandylor, Ryan Francis, Eoin O’Brien, Bear Williams, Randall J. Bacon, Alexander Winters, Alex Farnham, Kim DeLonghi, Randy Wayne, Mike Ferguson & Jonathan Samson