Cobwebs: the Trinity Arises – review

Director: Delia Ruffin

Release date: 2022

Contains spoilers

For reasons that will become quickly apparent, I am not going to give this film the sort of in-depth review I normally do, and I do not intend to give the film a score either. I think to do the latter would be unfair.

wearing a head as a hat

I stumbled across this film on Tubi and, as it started, I was struck by the fact that a medieval battle scene between (daywalking) vampires, fallen angels and werewolves was a bit of a mixed bag in that (other than the angels wear white) there isn’t much to distinguish the groups physically. I did get a momentary glimpse of what looked like someone wearing (what came across as) a poodle’s head hat but mostly the werewolves had fangs (top and bottom). The photography was sharp, however, and the actual sword fighting looked pretty good.

vampires

The fight goes on a wee bit and the combatants sat on the sidelines talking, interspersed with battle, might have been an attempt at non-linear filmmaking but they didn’t quite pull it off. The film cuts to the present eventually. Now we have been told that there are witches also, and they made it possible for the vampires to daywalk. We hear that the leader of the vampires is called Beowulf (Nathan Markham), though I am not sure if we actually see him. We also hear about the Trinity – some sort of prophesised triumvirate.

fallen angels

Other than that, well this was confused with characters appearing who we know little or nothing about and are left unaware of their allegiances or even their names. The best I can tell you is that there are deaths and a witch uses black magic to bring them back and this changes time (right at the end of the film)… I was left thinking that it was a shame as there was real competence in the photography, some pretty good sfx but it was narratively a dud, with an inability to explain the plot/characters to the viewer.

a witch

Then I came to the IMDb page and the film is listed as 1 hour and 45 minutes – forty minutes longer that the 65-minute cut on Tubi. At that point I decided that doing a full review was unfair as it appears that a whole chunk of film is missing. It won’t help some aspects but a different, longer cut might help the issues around characterisation and narrative. I will leave things here then, with a promise that, should I ever get to see the longer cut – assuming IMDb is right, I will watch and review that.

The imdb page is here.