There is a fine line between good and bad cinema and sometimes, if the creators are lucky, the film can end up being so bad that it is actually good. This can be accomplished on purpose by making a film intentionally silly or by kind of making fun of horror tropes despite the fact that the film-makers didn't have very much money to deal with. Unfortunately for Nix it appears as though they actually did have quite a lot of money to throw around, but neglected to spend it on important things like people who can act and a decent script.
src
This film isn't that unique in that a family ends up getting kind of messed up when their younger sister disappears into a lake a the hands of some weird Swamp Thing type monster. I will say this: They did a good job with the monster because it doesn't look like a sweaty guy in a rubber suit at any point. It also doesn't appear to be CGI so kudos to them for not ruining this aspect of it.
src
Between an absolutely terrible script filled with extremely trite dialogue and the fact that the people in the cast range from looking like they have never done any acting before to people that think over-acting is the only thing they need to do. Grandma is the worst at this (pictured above.) In every scene that she is in she flies off the handle in a completely unnecessary way. Her outbursts come quickly with almost no build-up and then in the next scene she will be calmly sitting on the front porch. It doesn't make sense.
I wanted to think that a lot of this was intentional seeing as how this movie is directed by Anthony C. Ferrante, who also directed all of the absurd Sharknado films. I don't think that is what we are seeing here though. They are clearly going for serious and psychological scares but because of the low caliber of actors and their almost non-existent skills, every scene falls flat.
src
recognize these faces? Of course you don't and you never will either
Of all the people that were in the cast the only person that I can attribute with any real acting skill would be Angela Cole who plays a bit part of the apparently drug-addled mother Steffi who does a very terrible job of looking after her daughter "Zoey." Angela doesn't even appear in most of the cast and crew pictures I can find so this suggests to me that she was actually too busy doing real work to be a part of these promotional events. Good for her. I think she will probably try to distance herself from this movie if she goes on to do other, better things.
Should I watch it?
Normally I will give a great deal of leeway to horror films, even low-budget ones because I am a big fan of the genre and can relate to how difficult it would be to make a horror movie with little money. Based on the success of the director in the past I don't think that is the issue here. The issue isn't even a bad premise it's just the execution of said premise that is done so poorly here. I suppose I could suggest that someone peruse this film purely to quickly identify how shockingly terrible the script and acting is because that stays fun right up until you've endured 40 minutes of it and realize that they were not joking, this is actually their very serious take on horror.... and they missed the mark by a lot.
