Cobweb - Review Thread

Cobweb is a movie that was kind of dumped into theaters by Lionsgate before being swiftly jettisoned to streaming in time for Halloween and while it has just enough creativity that I want to defend it the fact of the matter is that it got treated this way for a reason. This is a modern horror movie that acts as a metaphor for trauma… yeah, another one of those. In this case it’s meant to be something of a metaphor for situations in which a child seems to getting abused at home and you’re never quite sure what to do about that. The film kind of splits its point of view kind of awkwardly between the kid in question and his teacher while also kind of making both parties (and the audience) kind of unclear on what’s really going on. As you can probably tell from the title there is something of a spider theme to the ultimate horror stuff that emerges in the film and eventually that does lead to some interesting images late in the film but it’s a little too little too late. The intervening film just isn’t very suspenseful or scary and the drama isn’t really good enough to stand on its own outside of any scares. In fact this whole basic concept was done much more concisely in the second short from the 1995 horror anthology film Tales From the Hood. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a terrible movie or anything and it did keep my attention for the most part, rather this is just a movie that kind of just isn’t good enough to stand out or really impress in any major way. I’m about as indifferent towards it as I possibly can be.