"The Flood" is spectacularly stupid but also a dull, incompetent crock
Cops and convicts run afoul of each other—and alligators—in a police station during a raging hurricane. Full of simple-pleasure potential that quickly melts away, “The Flood” is the unfortunate outcome: an egregiously low-rent disaster movie/creature feature that could have been interchangeably called “The Hurricane” or “The Alligators.” By calling itself “The Flood,” it kind of buries the lede here. It’s a bad title, but then again, at least the rest of the movie follows suit. Remember “Crawl” from four summers ago? This reptilian-brained crap is not that.
A busload of dangerous prisoners in transit during “Hurricane Gustavo” hunkers down in a Louisiana police station run by Sheriff Jo Newman (Nicky Whelan). What could possibly go wrong? Well, a horde of alligators is already on the roof of the station (somehow) and makes its way inside. Meanwhile, an armed group (led by Louis Mandylor) plans on bailing out one of the inmates, cop killer Russell Cody (Casper Van Dien), and “Assault on Precinct 13”-ing the place. Each grossly leering prisoner gets a name and a mini bio (i.e. Floyd, murder and hate crimes, multiple life sentences), but they’re all a disposable lot. These inmates, the sheriff, two deputies, and guards aren’t enough, of course, so Russell Cody’s four-person breakout squad means more fodder for the hungry hungry gators.
Dull, incompetent, and spectacularly stupid, “The Flood” isn’t even a slab of B-movie fun in the way certain SyFy Channel or Asylum releases can be. Did director Brandon Slagle mean to make a terrible movie? Probably not, but it’s awfully hard to tell. The alligator effects are the dodgiest of dodgy, so roughly unfinished and too glossy to pose a real threat or even look halfway real. What’s more, how the amateurishly rendered gators are defeated is so simple it’s a non-event.
Everyone’s got to eat, but Nicky Whelan, who does work consistently, really deserves better projects than this clunker and last summer’s “Maneater.” Here, she gets to play dress-up in a sheriff uniform, but it’s as if she was told everything would look fine in post when that couldn’t be further from the truth. Not that we’re expecting sparkling, Aaron Sorkin-level dialogue here, but screenwriters Chad Law and Josh Ridgway come up with some truly wretched, laughable dialogue that tries to be clever and/or funny. "We're up to our assholes in alligators," one inmate jokes. “That’s no way to treat a lady,” another convict says to another who killed his own wife. The rest of the painful writing is a lot of "we gotta get out of here," "it's time to make a decision," and "if you want to survive the night, we're gonna have to find out a way to get along." Groan.
Director Slagle’s leaden, tension-free pacing doesn’t help, eating up too much time with exposition as if we’re asked to actually care about this surplus of characters. The production design is also so cheap that one assumes the filmmakers just had an empty building available, buckets of water, and rain machines on hand. Even a retired sheriff’s “plack” looks like a piece of poster board from OfficeMax, and there are so many establishing shots, particularly of the police station, that the lack of resources couldn’t be clearer. It’s always important to remember how hard it is to get a movie made and financed, but “The Flood” feels conceived with enough cynicism to earn negative feedback, as if moviegoers will watch anything and hold no standards. If a movie about fake-as-hell alligators swimming loose in a flooded police station isn't thrilling us, then what are we even doing here? This is an utter waste of time.
Grade: F
Saban Films is releasing “The Flood” (91 min.) in theaters, on demand and digital on July 14, 2023.
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