My quick rating – 3.9/10. Two estranged friends hit the road to shoot a feature film. That’s already a red flag—nobody ever makes good decisions when cameras are rolling in the middle of nowhere. Sure enough, instead of coming back with a script, Will (Erik Fitzpatrick) and Evan (Ben Rutz) end up snatched by some Appalachian cryptid that apparently moonlights as a tour guide through a forest labyrinth. Nothing says reconciliation quite like trying not to get shocked in Spiral Drive.
Credit where it’s due: Fitzpatrick and Rutz sell their friendship (or lack thereof) pretty well. If they aren’t buddies in real life, they should be, because their banter comes off natural—annoying, but natural. If they are real friends, then well, they’ve got years of practice sniping at each other. Either way, it works.
And yes, folks, it’s found footage. Because why not? Nothing screams “authentic horror” quite like shaky cam in the dark and lots of heavy breathing. Still, I’ll give Spiral Drive this: it actually bothers to explain why they don’t just drop the damn camera and run. In this case, the creature wants them to keep filming, like a twisted director forcing reshoots. Finally, a half-plausible reason why people cling to their camcorders while being chased through the woods.
Of course, there are some glaring issues. When our heroes realized they were lost, maybe stopping at the strip mall or one of the nearby residential houses would’ve been a smarter option than venturing down a sketchy dirt road that screams “alien buffet ahead.” Uneven pacing? Absolutely. Dragging scenes? Definitely. But hey, it has imagination, and for someone who usually loathes this genre with the fire of a thousand suns, my not tearing it apart is high praise.
The real takeaway here: somebody needs to give Fitzpatrick a budget. Not because I think he’d make a masterpiece, but because one, I’d like to see what he could actually pull off with some resources—and two, it would get him off camera. His character was by far the one I was rooting for the aliens to probe into oblivion.
In the end, Spiral Drive is like finding a VHS tape under your car seat that costs more to rewind than to make. It’s not good, but it’s not completely hopeless either. If this movie had a $50 million budget? Easy—knock three points off my score. Since there is no trailer on YouTube, here is the entire movie. Check it out since this was uploaded by the creators. So it shouldn’t be taken down for any illegal reasons.
