By Simon Thompson
Directed by J. Horton and written by Gregory Blair Craving tells the story of a group of junkies who are trapped in a small town bar after a drug deal ends in disaster. To make matters worse as the group suffers from withdrawal symptoms, they are being attacked by a mysterious monster hidden inside the bar that’s trying to pick them off one by one and could be hiding inside any of them. In Hollywood pitch terms basically it’s Reservoir Dogs meets 12 Angry Men meets John Carpenter’s The Thing meets Night of the Living Dead, but without the one crucial element that makes all of those movies work: simplicity.
Craving suffers from telling its story mostly through flashbacks, detailing how its cast of characters all ended up in this situation in the first place, which slows the narrative down to a snail’s pace because the information being conveyed isn’t particularly interesting and diverts too much attention from the main plot. This leads us to problem number two, the plot suffers from having far too many characters that need to be set up and introduced to try and show why the audience should care about them, which a 1 hr 23 mins run time simply doesn’t allow you to do.
The examples that I mentioned in the first paragraph all work because they don’t give the audience long-winded flashbacks for each character and they simply let their narratives unfold in the present, leaving many key events as ambiguous as possible to keep the audience guessing -something that Horton and Blair seem to really struggle with. From a dialogue standpoint this film contains a cheesier script than the original Resident Evil game, to such an extent that it ruins Sophia Cacciola’s beautiful cinematography as soon as one of the characters opens their mouths.
Overall Craving is a mediocre horror-neo noir with gorgeous cinematography, but it is riddled with clunky dialogue, pacing issues, acting that wouldn’t be out of place in Troll 2 , and a narrative so generic and cliched that you could order it from Wish.com.
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