Blackwater

• Written and Directed by Iain Fulton
• July 27, 2019 (Australia)

A gang of outlaws take over a camp seeking a buried treasure of gold.

At an hour and one minute I didn’t expect too much from Blackwater. And during the opening seconds I realized I wouldn’t even get that. Before watching I read that this was shot largely using greenscreen and that was my fault because once you see it you cannot unsee it. It leads to some laughs that were clearly not intended by the filmmakers.

The effects used in this movie extend to even blood spatter. Somebody gets shot and it’s CGI spray. You can make your own blood squibs if you’re too cheap to buy them. There are videos on YouTube that are pretty consistent in the manufacture thereof. The computer misting and squirting gave me the giggles.

That’s quite possibly not the most egregious sin of this entire movie. The acting is painfully bad. Either this was simply thrown together or the cast has virtually no talent. Maybe they never did a second take. I do not know but it lacks anything that helps in the suspension of disbelief. They try their hard to hardest to speak Old West sounding language but it is delivered so poorly and so stiffly that you’re curious if they even rehearsed.

John Regan who plays Sheriff Gill Sanderson looks like he’s about 102. He is certifiably elderly. I’m just trying to figure out how he got the part in the film as well as in the story. Maybe a little explanation to say it’s a token position because the town is so quiet or some demonstration of him being tougher than he looks but none of that is really offered when we meet him.

Our villain of Ace Dalton (John Norris) is after the hidden gold in the town. It is such a huge secret that the knowledge thereof might be tough to come by. So how did he hear about it? After writing that I am not even sure if the townsfolk even have heard of it.

It feels like they’re trying to go for a bigger ending than they have money for and when that fails they try to go for an emotional impact. You see the woman who ultimately become sheriff (who is the daughter of the current sheriff) but this montage of supposedly touching images has no connection to the character since we never got much of relationship between the two. 

Blackwater is an unintentionally bad movie. Or intentionally bad. Whichever. It’s only an hour so if you’re curious you’re not going to lose too much time, but it is not really worth it.