While I may be in the minority on this, I thought Open Water was a pretty effective little film. It was far from perfect, but it captured a raw feeling of danger and dread, one where you were always on edge for an eventual shark attack. The film must have made some fans other than myself, because directors David Nerlich and Andrew Traucki have clearly channeled the film in their debut feature, Black Water. Unfortunately, while the template is in place, that constant feeling of being in danger has been replaced by a constant feeling of boredom.

A married couple, Adam and Gracie, along with Gracie’s sister Lee, are on Christmas vacation in Australia. After celebrating the holiday, they all decide to go on a “Black Water” fishing tour. They end up missing the tour by a few minutes, but a deck hand offers to take them out on a small motor boat as he doesn’t have much work to do at the time. After arriving at a remote destination, the boat is hit from underneath and flipped. The tour guide is killed, while the other 3 climb up into the near by trees along the estuary. They soon see a crocodile lurking around the overturned boat, and realizing that a rescue may be out of the question, they decide to try and figure out a way of escaping on their own.

While the setup is more than passable, it’s the following execution that is utterly flawed. The majority of the film, to put it bluntly, is like watching paint dry. You have three people hanging out in a tree for nearly the first two-thirds of the film arguing with one another, freaking out, and rarely acting. One of the main problems with the film is that they’re in the tree, above where the crocodile can attack. In a film like Open Water, the waiting game wasn’t nearly as arduous since they were in the water with the sharks, so something could theoretically happen at any time. Here, the suspense is limited to when the characters venture down into the water to try and flip the boat over, and these moments are few and far between. What also kills the suspense is seeing that every time they do get in the water, the crocodile does end up showing up sooner or later. There’s really no balance. When they’re in the trees, there won’t be an attack. When they’re in the water, there will be an attack. It’s a pattern that very quickly nullifies any suspense the film could have had.

The Open Water similarities I mentioned earlier actually turn into the point of plagiarism in one section of the film. There’s a scene in Black Water at night during a thunderstorm, where the screen is basically black with occasional flashes where you see the crocodile thrashing around in the water and biting the base of a tree. This is pretty much a direct rip-off of the pen-ultimate scene in Open Water, and it’s just plain bad filmmaking. These guys couldn’t have possibly believed that everyone that watched this didn’t see Open Water, could they?

However bad most things were, there were a few good things about the film. Regardless of what I think about the directors not being original and seemingly not understanding how to create suspense, they do realize that the less you see of the crocodile, the better. When you do see the croc, it does ignite your interest in the film again. Unfortunately, after these scenes that begin to bring you back into the film, we’re back to the characters in the trees, doing nothing. The final act of the film is also surprisingly decent, albeit a bit overly theatrical in execution. It’s a jarring transition, one that doesn’t mesh well with the rest of the film. The directors seemed to be going for such realism before the final act, to the point of boring the viewer, that how things play out in the climax seems out of place.

Black Water is a film with an identity crisis in a number of ways. It borrows heavily from Open Water; it tosses out a built-upon base of realism for a theatrical climax; it’s a drama when in the trees and a horror flick when in the water. All of these things amount to a film that feels very uneven. While on occasion there are flourishes where the film begins to break out into something more, it always ends up falling right back into the aspects that just don’t work. This is one croc that doesn’t have much bite.