Don’t Move review
Not bad for a giant spider movie. Not really good for one either.
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Don’t Move
Directed by Maclain Nelson
Written by James Murray, Maclain Nelson and Darren Wearmouth
Starring Lyndsy Fonseca, Russ, Tom Cavanagh, Hunter King, Joseph Lee Anderson, Rob Riggle, T-Pain and Tristan Wilder Hallett
Don’t Move Review
Like any subgenre of horror…creature features range from excellent to unwatchable. Don’t Move is one of the most in the middle of those extremes creature features you’re likely to find. Pretty good envelopes every moment. It’s never bad. It’s never really good either. It sits in the exact center of whatever diagram you want to draw around this type of movie. That’s obviously not great news…but it’s not bad news either. Don’t Move is a B movie that throws some quality performances into a predictable and surprisingly tame little creature feature. Let’s deal with that last part first.
When I call Don’t Move “tame” it’s not because it doesn’t have its moments. It does. And it’s not because it is afraid to feed its characters to its giant spider. It does that too. No, I call Don’t Move tame because it opens with one of the most harrowing death scenes around…and then never tries to match that intensity or level again. Frankly, it’s somewhat shocking to see so many deaths happen out of frame when the story opens as viscerally as it does.
So, let’s talk about that opening scene. It takes place a year before the rest of the movie and involves the incredible loss suffered by Lyndsy Fonseca’s character Megan. Megan waits for her husband and young son to return from a scary dark ride…only to watch in horror as the ride catches fire. She runs in and manages to save several people by unlocking their lap bars…but she’s too late to save her family. And Don’t Move doesn’t just imply that she was too late…it shows you. We watch the car in front of them emerge from the ride engulfed in flames…and we see her family slowly approach the fire with no way to avoid it. Megan gets close enough to be burned herself…but can’t unlock their safety bar. We just watch her child screaming as her husband tries to comfort him while begging someone to drag his wife away.
Yeah. It’s messed up. It’s like a Final Destination kill on steroids. And it sets a standard that Don’t Move stubbornly refuses to approach again. Instead, the movie slows way down so we can introduce the doomed members of a Church camping trip. Megan reluctantly decides to attend at the last minute…so there’s a lot of awkward moments of people trying to be comforting and kind because they know what she’s been through. Fonseca is great in this movie…make no mistake about that. But the movie doesn’t seem to know what exactly it wants to do with any of this. Tom Kavanagh is great as the pastor of the church. Rob Riggle is great as their faux-tour guide/bus driver. The rest of the cast is great too. They just aren’t given much of a story to invest in.
Now…that doesn’t have to be the end of the world. When a giant spider starts popping down from the trees to kill them…who really cares about these character arcs anyway? The problem is that Don’t Move spends a lot of time developing those arcs that you aren’t going to care about. There’s a love triangle…I guess. There are opportunities for Megan to become protective of a child which makes total narrative sense. For some reason there’s a drug selling subplot. Primate did a good job with these false flag subplots earlier this year. Opening the door to one only to quickly throw it off the side of a cliff never to be thought of again. That was fun. Gremlins famously drops all of its small town plots as soon as chaos takes over Kingston Falls. That was fun too. Don’t Move’s uses its plot threads as a way to fill time that ends up doing more harm than good. Worse, it features actors fully capable of delivering funny performances and then gives them nothing funny to say or do.
Humor isn’t always the answer, mind you. But when your story is starting to get boring and you have Tom Kavanagh playing a too joyful preacher and Rob Riggle playing a know-it-all who probably doesn’t know much…you should probably lean into that. Don’t Move mostly just kills time until killing time.
Which, by the way, is why the movie survives the misses it throws out. Not only is the cast good enough to make the lack of fun watchable…but a GIANT SPIDER starts picking them off in the woods. That’s what we’re here for. And it’s fun when it happens in Don’t Move. There are a couple of fun jump scares. The characters get to be pretty smart, all things considered. Bravery is often rewarded with the spider getting you. You know…fun stuff. Creature feature stuff. Which is when Don’t Move is at its best. When it commits to being the B movie and not whatever it is trying to do the rest of the time. It’s not going anywhere anyway. Because a GIANT SPIDER is going to kill people before it can. You can see how the floor on this thing was “pretty good”. It’s a shame it didn’t try to shoot for the ceiling.
Scare Value
I’m too old to like when people use the word “mid” and I often doubt they’re using it correctly when they do. Describing Don’t Move feels like the right time to use it if there ever was one. The word sounds like an insult…but it literally means average. That’s what Don’t Move ends up being. Pretty good. Decent. Fine. Average. Mid. The cast does a good job…the script really doesn’t. But eventually a giant spider is going to swoop down and snatch someone so how much more do you really need?
2.5/5
Don’t Move Link
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