Spiral comes home on DVD and Blu-ray on Janu, from RLJE Films.
And it’s not afraid to be as dark and emotionally gut-punching as it needs to be to drive its point home.” Upon its initial release on Shudder, our own John Squires called it “a damn good horror movie, gripping from start to finish and home to surprising turns and a devastating mythology all its own. Spiral is directed by Kurtis David Harder and written by Colin Minihan and John Poliquin.
Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman and Ari Cohen star as Malik and Aaron, and Jennifer Laporte plays daughter Kayla. The more they uncover homophobic reactions, the more a decade-plus long mystery unravels, putting the family’s lives at risk. Their friendly neighbors throw them a welcoming party, teasing something sinister lurking just beneath the surface of warm smiles. In the 1995-set Spiral, a gay couple moves their teenage daughter to a new neighborhood, searching for a better life. Beneath the scares lies a far more horrifying reality. This is just a franchise going around in circles.Social thrillers or horror movies use the genre to highlight oppression in various forms. Spiral has a strong cast and some good ideas, but struggles to say anything new or interesting about any of it. It’s less beholden to the previous movies than 2017’s Jigsaw, but any effort to move on from Jigsaw and John Kramer is undermined by an overreliance on old tricks and tics. There’s even a re-jigged version of the ‘Hello Zepp’ theme (in this case, it’s ‘Hello Zeke’) to play over the finale and closing credits.Īll of which makes it harder to take Spiral on its own terms. While lacking in invention, the traps are plenty gnarly, and the death sequences suitably grisly. Utilising dimly lit offices, dimly lit warehouses and dimly lit apartments, it certainly looks and feels like a Saw movie. Jackon in a Saw movie! And he barely gets to do anything!īut at least the film looks the part. The latter is particularly underutilised, in what is essentially a glorified cameo.
Rock has good chemistry with his co-stars, so it’s disappointing that he should get so little time with Minghella or Jackson. It’s easy to work out who the killer is when only a handful of characters get any real screen time or development. Even the gender-flipped shouty police captain is still just a shouty police captain. Jackson) are engaging characters, but everyone else is an ill-defined and lazy archetype. Banks, his partner (Max Minghella) and his father (Samuel L. It lacks both the overarching game narrative and sense of urgency that typically make a Saw film a Saw film. Detective Banks wanders from crime scene to crime scene, grimly inspecting the aftermath, never really uncovering anything that the killer doesn’t want him to. Nor does the film quite nail the structure of a Saw movie. Just who is being lazy here? Is it the writers, the creative department, or the killer himself? ‘What if Jigsaw was a cynical hack?’ is a question the franchise has asked many times, but it’s never quite clear whose fault it is when the traps suck. They’re lazy imitations of Jigsaw traps, lacking any understanding of what made the maestro really tick. There’s no depth, intricacy, or creativity to any of them. Saw VI’s attack on the life insurance industry was more biting than this.īut a Saw film is only as good as its traps, and these are some of the weakest yet. Bousman, Stolberg and Goldfinger shy away from anything that’s too damning of the force – and certainly any overt racial overtones. Its observations are as surface level as ever. But those hoping to see Saw refashioned into a topical horror thriller may be disappointed.
#Spiral horror serial
It’s less of a Saw movie, more Predator 2.Ĭurrent events being what they are, there’s never been a better time for a film about a serial killer taking on a precinct full of crooked cops. There’s even a heatwave, a nerdy new partner, and an angry captain shouting the odds. Rock doesn’t lack intensity, but the role is all cliche, left over from cop movies of the 90s. Spiral may be a showcase for Rock’s dramatic talents, but that doesn’t put him off the comedy monologues, riffing on everything from marriage to Forrest Gump.
Detective Ezekiel ‘Zeke’ Banks (Chris Rock) is on the case… and he has plenty to say about it. Someone is killing cops, kidnapping them and forcing them to play with the remnants of Jigsaw’s toy box. And it’s this thinking that informs Darren Lynn Bousman’s Spiral. From Danny Glover’s Detective Tapp to the parade of unfortunate police officers and FBI agents that followed, there was clearly something about cops that marked them out as ideal participants for his games.
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