Cobweb is not a good movie. 

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I don't think the dad's speech about "burying the bad pumpkins and hoping the next crop is better" was supposed to imply that he wants to kill Peter. Rather, it was his way to tell Peter why they put his sister in the wall (she was "a bad pumpkin", while Peter is the "next, better crop"), and they are going to kill her so that she doesn't "infect" him anymore. I think the part about them wanting to kill Peter was just a lie told by Sarah as a way to manipulate him. I agree that the movie was a let down, though.

Problem I have with a lot of these "Monster is a metaphor for abuse/trauma" movies is they never really seem to...do anything with that idea. "Abuse is bad and like a monster." or "Trauma is traumatic." is not really an interesting concept for a story.

You know what would have been actually interesting? If the parents were actually characterized as good, loving parents. Like that would neatly explain why they kept the daughter alive.

I doubt that the movie touches on this. But fun fact, if you eat Pumpkin soup every night for dinner, eventually your skin will start turning yellowish or orange. My sister was on a weird Pumpkin only vegan diet for a while where all she ate was baked pumpkin and pumpkin soup and in about a month her hands looked as if she had been using bags of Cheetos as gloves.

It’s like, the parents are too fucked up to think ‘they were right all along’. the one thing I could see working is having the sister, while looking like a monste, loving her brother and not being a danger to him, maybe even being (murderously) protective of him. and maybe she could be allowed to slip away at the end, like letting a spider out

Italian food has a history of being paired with wine, and wine had a history of being paired with ethylene glycol prior to mass fatalities, so in that aspect lasagna and antifreeze aren't such an unusual combination, at least from a historical standpoint.

The trailer made me think it was about a kid who's once loving parents were replaced with demons or monsters and he has to live with them because he doesnt know how to get help. It could have been such a good film, the parents at first seeming "off" but then getting more and more unhinged and monstrous over time. Maybe as a metaphor for alcohol and drug abuse and its impact in the children in the home? The trailer made it seem like a much more interesting movie. :/ It's a shame.

I would have found it interesting if the final subversion of expectations involved Peter deciding that he's going to love his sister no matter what, and he continues being kind and caring towards her even after she reveals herself to be a big angry monster. This would be an interesting direction for his bravery arc, because it takes a lot of courage to stare down a murderous monster and say "you're my sister, and I love you." His sister certainly wouldn't have expected that response, and Peter's kindness could have disarmed her enough for him to survive the encounter without violence. But hey, maybe that's just me being a sappy optimist who loves happy endings.

I know it's pointless to say because it'll never change, but... there really should be some kind of law against including dream sequence material in movie trailers. I've lost track of how many movies I've seen that have done this, and it's almost always because, if they don't show *that* in the trailer, what else could they show?

The movie aside these critiques just keep getting funnier and funnier. This specific flavor of drypan humor feels strangely unique among RU-vid video essays for some reason.

I actually had some issues with miss Divine. I do think she's is very easy to root for because she has Peter's safety at heart and is nice but that's sort of the bare minimum, and the way they wrote her handling Peter's possible abuse situation was very weird. It's clear they wanted her to go to their house but it just really makes no sense from a teacher's perspective, especially a substitute. I totally understand the difficulty and the problematic nature of handling a situation of abuse in the life of your student but in my opinion knocking on the door of his house and being like "Hello ma'am are you by any chance abusing your child" was a jaw-dropping moment. Again, it's a very difficult thing to handle, but you can assume that if a child writes "HELP ME" on a piece of paper it is likely that he for one reason or another can't go to his parents with it, because if he could he likely would have. Which is why reporting the cry for help to his potential abusers is a bad idea. If he's in fact being abused, you will get brushed off at the door since you have no authority, you're not CPS, you have no warrant, and the child will get punished for it and will have learned his lesson that he can't trust his teacher either. The parents will also become more careful. She also puts herself in a dangerous situation for many reasons, personally and professionally. Talking to the child first would make more sense to me, given that he's already reached out explicitly and you can have the conversation in a friendly non-confrontational manner if the child is cagey. That way you can sus out if your worries are indeed correct or maybe the child indeed has an overactive imagination, or simply drew a scary picture which was the assignment. Cooperating with a school psychologist is also a good idea, since while teachers have to have some knowledge in that area, they aren't trained professionals. It also gives you someone to back you up if the parents were to get defensive and accuse her of harassing them since she is showing up at their house for no reason. I am way overthinking this, but this film is sloppy and just wants people to be in the right place at the right time to do the horror stuff and that's one of the examples of how they do it.

The problem with this film is that none of the elements are inherently bad (except perhaps the cgi and lighting) but nothing is consistent and nothing works together. Even the cringey bits like the fathers line about ‘not being as sweet as it seems’ could have had a good pay off if that was in any way relevant to how the rat poison was used. If the poison had been used in the pumpkin cupcakes for example. It’s like the film suffers from horror movie character stupidity but to an extreme extent. We expect a level of incompetence from horror movie characters, I feel, there’s always a point where you question why a decision was made, but it can usually be written off as stress or something similar. It feels like here, they took that stereotype and really really ran with it. It’s a shame they couldn’t make the most of the positive aspects of the film.

Watched it a week ago because I recently re-entered a horror enjoying era. Tried gaslighting myself the first half of the movie that I was just not used to horror movies anymore and it wasn’t *that* bad. Thing is, I could tell from the beginning what the plot “twist” was gonna be. And it could have been well handled, with the predictability not taking away from the enjoyment of it, but no. It sucks whole heartedly and the entire time. Also yeah, terrible message around birth defects ? Like… you got parents who give birth to a baby that looks different and they just emprison her in their house, she then commits a murder cause she’s a kid that’s like, emotionally stunted from being held captive and surely berated and abused by her parents and when that happens their solution is to lock her up further in the house in a dingy basement moat and then in the walls. Fucking hell.

What you described is an issue I see in a lot of horror. They're a mash up of scary ideas that feel like they could work together, but there lacks that extra layer of polish that brings them all together in a way that feels deep rather than tacked on. If this script was given another look over to tie it all together and keep things consistent, it sounds like it could have been a pretty good story.

You'd think if the parents wanted their daughter gone, they would have just killed her and stuffed her body in the wall and the film be about her ghost haunting her brother. They killed the girl, so what's stopping them from killing their child? If you want a good 'something is in the house' film then watch Black Christmas (the 1970s one) or Barbarian.

Honestly they should have kept the daughter a victim, where while she is not a normal human she was never truly evil and have her telling Peter to hurt his bully being because she didn't know better, which would make sense as she had no way to learn healthy social skills including how to deal with bullies, especially with the way the parents acted.

From your description, it almost sounds like they had Anthony Starr, and just wanted to use his Homelander-level intimidation skills and so ham-fisted it in rather than create something organic. Personally, I think a movie about a family who keeps their eldest psychopathic-killer daughter locked up in their house could've been a cool story to watch, the parents doing everything possible to mitigate her influence, while the boundless curiosity of their young son leads to him releasing her from the prison they made for her, and the parents trying to hunt her down after she begins killing again. Watching Anthony Starr's mild-mannered father character getting more and more frustrated and angry before exploding when he hunts her, the mother taking care of stuff like cleaning and feeding the daughter and seeing the mixture of fear and love, I mean why wouldn't that work?

Yay! New video! 19:26 "Like a profiterole leaking with cream, these two suddenly start oozing the filthiest red flags on the planet!" I fucking love your writing. 😭😭😭😭

Between Cobweb and Skinamarink getting hyped, I've lost so much faith in people's taste in horror. Cobweb almost went somewhere that worked but I think making her human instead of something supernatural made it incredibly dumb and just created a laundry list of plot holes. If they explained the parents being so weird because they have to sacrifice people to keep her trapped for example. It would also explain why she can't just break through the walls or tumble the parents herself when they go in to feed her. Why she wouldn't just have her brother pass something like a hammer or a saw through the hole and escape herself. She's strong enough to rip a grown man in half bare handed but she can't yank a child off his feet holding her hair? If it had been a monster or demon they could have used a magic plot device to make it make sense. Why didn't the parents just kill her if she was just a scary looking child? Her being human just made almost everything that happened beyond dumb when you think about it. There was a good idea in there but the execution was terrible.

My thirst for bad horror movies/game critiques cannot be quenched and I hold you responsible for this vice of mine. Also if you look for another one : Unfriended.

Like in The Happening, the pumpkins decided to rise up.

It feels like this film was the latest victim of the 'twist for twists sake' disease plaguing Hollywood right now, like the directors felt so strongly that they had to keep the audience guessing that they flung in as many red herrings as they could. or maybe the writers were just playing gartic phone with the script lol. in any case, great video as always! if you're interested in a kind of subversion of the 'there's something in the walls' premise, I recommend checking out The People Under the Stairs. while a bit too goofy to be a true horror imo, it's very entertaining!

I could be off-base with this, since I haven't seen the movie myself, but the girl in the wall paired with the abusive patriarch kind of sounds like a *really* clumsy homage to "The Yellow Wallpaper". The movie definitely hits a lot of the same beats: protagonist being isolated and confined by the patriarch, protagonist hearing/talking to people in the walls, protagonist ripping down the wallpaper because they believe someone is trapped in the walls... It almost feels like one of the writers read Charlotte Gilman's story, absolutely missed the point, then snorted 14 lines of cocaine and went: "lots of popular horror movies focus on kids, so let's throw The Yellow Wallpaper and 2013's Mama into a blender and see what happens".

Finally someone roasting this movie! I hated it the minute the teacher went to the kids house on her own and gave his mom the picture. She only reported it afterwards when she has no longer has any evidence. She is winning at idiot ball.

New halloween plans! Nothing better than torturing friends with bad horror movies

The only thing I could think of was the Peter Peter pumpkin eater nursery rhyme and it reminded me of that. But also made no sense really? Like apparently the original rhyme was about chastity belts or an unfaithful wife so that doesn’t really make any sense either but why do we expect films to make sense? That would be wanting far too much (insert eye roll here) Peter, Peter pumpkin eater,
Had a wife but couldn't keep her;
He put her in a pumpkin shell
And there he kept her very well.

Peter, Peter pumpkin eater,
Had another and didn't love her;
Peter learned to read and spell,
And then he loved her very well. On a side note, there’s a really good horror visual novel called Pumpkin eater that is a way more interesting look into a nuclear family devolving into madness. Great video as always even if the film sounds pretty shit lmao.

Love that Signalis music has started appearing in your vids, it’s so instantly recognisable and comfortable. Also I gotta say, there’s something really hilarious about the idea of Peter getting back at Brian in a way that should have been satisfying, but he’s like “Well I already planned my revenge, guess I gotta” so he just pushes him down the stairs anyway, like out of obligation or something

Maybe the rat poison tasting like cinnamon is also a reference to pumpkin spice lol

The problem is that even nowadays, there are so few high quality horror movies that horror fans end up getting a little bit too hype over very mediocre movies 😂

But that creature at the end, I dunno, it walking around like a twitching spider mixed with that *chefs kiss* voice acting, getting some silent hill enemy vibes 😂

Ah yes the "We are not a Violent family we don't to that BUT I'm gonna abuse you because I love you" A true classic

Movie feels like it does not know what it wants to be. It's all over the place

“Passed around like your aunt at a swinger party” LMFAO

The first half of the movie was fun. I was wondering where it was all going, but it was going to something that felt generated by AI, sadly.

your sweater goes so unbelievably hard

Your videos and content are always such an escape for me. Thank you very much

I think this is the calico cat of horror scripts. Pieces that worked got stitched together from different movies. One was about pumpkins, another was about spiders, etc. That's my best guess.

It's not breadcrumbs, more like a whole loaf of bread in the middle of the forest path

This is great timing - I was literally checking your channel yesterday to see if I'd missed any videos! So good to see you as always Mert, hope you're doing well!

Your horror media videos are an absolute vibe

The final "twist" that the parents were good people all along seems strange when you consider that they literally locked Peter in a basement for who knows how long because he drew a picture. They literally have a whole secret punishment basement - I don't think you can bounce back from that

This movie reminds me of that drama warm up game where you're in a circle with people and you make a story by going around and each saying one word or one sentence 😂🤐

This was a great video, but I love how your cats are playing at the beginning. That's really cute.

Heyo you look so comf-coze in that sweater, makes me happy for autumn seeing people all bundled up! :)

Hell yeah, thank you so much for uploading again! I've been coming back to your videos for rewatches, I'm starved for more :)

Getting expelled for pushing someone down the stairs? Does this like ever happen?

I thought the movie was going to take a different direction. Like the mother using the veil of a friend in the walls as a way to help her son at first and then, because she is too cowardly to find her own agency, manipulates her son to get at his father who killed the young girl that disappeared. Like, a sort of horror take on living in an abusive family and what that does to a kid with the horror and odd actions people present to us are emotional allegory for the pov character. Much like "Master" did. The monster sister direction just, was an oddly stupid take that ended up dropping all of it's build up to make a really, really lackluster payoff that accidently leaves a bad message for it's premise. A message of "hey parents, your abuse of your creepy daughter because you think she's ugly is warranted, cuz she's a monster. It's in the blood. Next time kill her and not cage her." I guess another reading on this could be a prequel to "Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater" and he grows up to kill his wives, thinking they are haunted by his sister or some nonsense. I dunno, this movie was really janked.

Like your great aunt at a swingers party 😂 your reads are always on point. Thank you so much for your content 🙏🙏

from your description the morale is: It is not bad to have mystery and vagueness in horror but if you do it too much your audience may be too confused to be scared.

It is always a fantastic time no matter what's going when you upload a video. Always love your videos and it's perfect for spooky time!

"idk why there are so many pumpkin motifs in this movie, anyway, trickortreaters halloweentime pumpkins" bruh lol

Spiderman spinoff that we deserved

Another movie I don't have to bother adding to the list! Thank you for saving my time.

0:41 the brief but pronounced pause as the cats zoom off got a ripe chuckle out of me

Hearing this being explained it feels that this was supposed to be a short series. Just a few episodes. However then it was made into a movie. Kind of like those older TV Show "Movies" where the creators just put X episodes together to make it 90 minutes.

Wait...this movie is just Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater??? "Peter, Peter pumpkin eater, Had a wife but couldn't keep her; He put her in a pumpkin shell And there he kept her very well. Peter, Peter pumpkin eater, Had another and didn't love her; Peter learned to read and spell, And then he loved her very well."

Your jumper is incredibly cool :O

Is Seffy getting along with the new cat? Was she playing or fughting with it early on the video?

I've been subscribed to you for a while, and I always really appreciate that your videos are so competently captioned! It's really awesome to see every time I open one of your videos :D!

When the friend that won't let you kill spiders make a movie 😂

Your remark about Anthony Starr is so real :')

Mark being a complete lunatic is infact foreshadowed by the fact that they cast Antony Starr for him 😂

Gurl, I'm not your mum but I was not ready for that! LOL!

this movie is SO CLOSE to being decent. Imagine instead the movie focused on Peter's growing isolation. We watch as he gets bullied at school and anytime he tries to talk to his parents, they tell him "making friends is hard, you just gotta keep being you." completely dismissing all of his concerns to the point where he starts feeling isolated from his family as well. We get little hints of the abuse Peter suffers through during the movie. His father forces him to kill a rat, and gets mad at him when the child is reluctant. The mother gets cold and snappy towards peter when presented with the drawing. His parents are against him trick or treating but he keeps pushing so they lock him in his room, threatening to put him in the basement if he acts out. This threat immediately freaks peter out, who begins silently crying and physically trying to hide himself despite being locked in his own room. We get the sense that he is terrified of the basement, and its been the ultimate punishment for him if he acts up. While in his room he beings talking to the girl behind the wall, who is nothing but a supportive voice and a being of comfort. We get more clips of him being locked up in his room talking to the voice, confiding in her completely. The voice, having earned peters trust, begins urging him to hurt those that have hurt him. Peter gets freaked out and tries to block out the voice, and has nightmares of him killing his parents only for them to appear like they did in the nightmare sequence. At school, the bullying gets worse and we watch Peter withdraw into himself. His only source of happiness is his pumpkin that does get smashed. In a rage, Peter hurts his bully in a similar way that he had killed the rat, all while hearing the girls voice urging him to do so. He gets expelled and put in the basement as his punishment. The girls voice is stronger in the basement, taking more of a raspy note and her words get more cruel. Gone is the gentle urging, but instead demands that Peter hurt and kill. Peter doesnt seem horrified this time. Instead, he seems calmed by her words. The entire time the teacher has been growing more and more concerned, and since she is new in town, a lot of our exposition comes through via her. We learn peters parents are "protective" because his older sister had been kidnapped on halloween. Ever since the family has gotten more reserved and cold to other towns folk. But, instead of the parents having killed the girl, she literally just got kidnapped. Its revealed that in their paranoia they went from loving parents, to over protective, to abusive trying to keep their son safe. But there abuse has pushed Peter too far. Peter puts the rat poison in his fathers food, burying him with the rat. Peter throws his mother in the basement and leaves her there till she starves to death. He has given into the voice, which sounds monstrous. The teacher goes to investigate, finding Peter and his dead family. Once the abuse was revealed, Peters actions are deemed as self defense and he is put into the foster system. The ending is him in a new home, maybe with the teacher, maybe with a random family- and as he's falling asleep he hears the girl in the wall softly calling for him, waking him up. It is left open ended if the girl is a supernatural element, a literal haunting, or a manifestation of the abuse Peter went through.

It makes me so happy seeing a new video from you! Love your uploads!

I researched a bit about pumpkins because I also wondered about the significance and it turns out that pumpkins can spontanously grow into a wilder less domesticated form that is poisonous to humans. So I think a lot of the metaphor about burying a harvest and the constant eating of pumpkin soup might relate to that. But that makes it absolutely laughably bad to not poison the parents with a pumpkin. Maybe they figured the death would be too slow or they changed it because it's not a well known fact and people would have their suspension of disbelief broken? Oh well ...

I actually got to watch this the other day, I’m glad I did now! Also LOVE your sweater it looks so cozy!🖤

I was kinda zoning out, watching RU-vid before bed, before 5:35 woke me the fuck up lmao

By far the standout was the sudden Sam Raimi blasts of gore during that last act. Besides that it clung onto the ideas of parental abuse and didn’t really deal with them in any sort of way.

You know it's gonna be a good evening when MertKayKay uploads a vid!!! Been on a binge watch recently too! Time for another great analysis!!

This comment is 3 weeks late, but I just found your channel and have kept your videos on in the background while I work from home! I have binge watched almost all of them, and I wanted to say that your videos are amazing! It is really nice to hear this sort of in depth dive into games and other media.

im so glad i chose to watch *talk to me* instead of *cobweb* when i decided to start getting back into horror

y'know, I have to wonder if the obsession with pumpkins, girl in the walls, and boy named Peter are meant to be a reference to the old nursery rhyme of Peter the Pumpkin Eater

girl got that certified cool drip

The one thing I liked was the exaggerated silhouettes in some shots and the direction in some scenes. It just sucks that the script wasnt as good. Like peter was wayyyyy too ready to murder his parents he had no problems with 2 days earlier just because of a voice in the wall. I see what they were going for, but damn it fell short hard which is disappointing

There is a better version of this plot in a great creepypasta called Campfire Tales by William Rayne. In it, the basement door is a real reinforced structure introduced early on. The brother is aware of the sisters existence and she shares a lot of details with him, spinning her own narrative. The parents are fundamentally unhappy while trying desperately to have a normal life. Parent really love the brother and clearly hate the sister. The only pain they bring to the brother is by unsuccessfuly trying to teach him why the sister needs to remain locked. Their failure to do is what brings us to the end of the tale. Weirdly enough, this story too has tonal shifts, starting, as the name implies, as the campfire tale. I urge you to give it a read or a listen on Dark Somnium channel. Campfire tails is what Cobweb could have been

:D thank god a new video of mertkaykay Mercilessly ripping into a horror movie

Great in-depth review! Whether you make a video essay that builds up from a very interesting thesis that leads to abundant ideas to exploit, a more classical review of a piece of media, or an analysis of a particular subject inside that piece of media, you always hit the nail on the head. Keep up the good work! ❤️

I watched it on Hulu with ads. The ads really made for a disjointed experience watching a horror film. The extra cost of paying for another add free streaming service is beyond my means at present, though.

"It's easy to surprise people if you lie to them" - low effort writing

Thanks for saving me a watch.

hell yeah, been looking forward to a new mert vid :D !!!

Hey keep up the work! Your work is always the highlight of my day! I love the clear work and care you put into your work. Your witty and insightful commentary is an absolute delight. Plus the additional bonus appearance of your cat is pretty great too 😂.

Always happy to see you pop a vid. As for Cobweb, I thought it was fairly decent, but yeah, the parts didn't meld together that well in places

Good lord I had this on in the backgound while playing a particularly dark cave bit of Subnautica and the party blower at 16:43 scared the bejesus out of me.

Wake up babe, new MertKayKay video dropped

I think the girl in the wall egged peter on to hurt the bully knowing he would likely get in trouble. This would further create a disconnect from his parents who would punish him and therefore lead to him following what she says.

This movie felt so random and just like a bunch usual horror elements turned into Frankensteins monster. Let's throw everything at the drawing board and see what sticks. Oh it all sticks? Let's just do everything! "What aspects of horror do you want to create?" The crew, "Yes."😂❤ No One Will Save You was good. I was more impressed then I thought. I was hyped for this, kept hearing it was pretty good but God, it was terrible.

Damn that Raid intro was actually pretty funny.. I will never play it but I will watch the ad lol

The ending reveal absolutely killed the movie for me, if it was like a ghost or something, idk it'd be cliche but it might have at least made some amount of sense, but the fact that the sister was actually real and hidden in the walls and was a weird monster thing?? It just got kinda ridiculous and the design for her was awful

Yoooo that ad read be smooooooth

Honesty i think the movie's stiry would've been better if the monster was a vengeful spirit and the dead body buried in the garden was her, that way they could've had the supernatural aspect and make the parents more of a threat Edit: me and my girlfriend expected this movie to be like a live action Coraline do to alot of tiktoks saying it seems to be like one and i was honesty disappointed

It has elements I love but overall its quite silly. The end really destroys it

It’s interesting watching both this and the RLM video on the movie wherein they talked about how much they liked it. I enjoy seeing contrasting opinions/interpretations and you both had entirely valid reasons for feeling how you did so it’s cool to see how the same concept comes across to different people

Hope the creepy spider girl is in the next Spiderverse movie.

While this movie was super disappointing for many of the same reasons, I was relieved the sister in the wall wasn't just in his head. Through the middle part I was getting so worried it was going to be another 'mentally ill person murders a bunch of people' plot. But then it wasn't which was good, but also baffling because why are the parents in denial that he's talking to his sister they know is in the walls? But like you said, the movie does seem like it had a bunch of different writers who were never allowed to speak to each other while writing their own parts. The middle writer 100% thought it was a mental illness is a monster movie while the final act writer wanted a real monster movie. (And I'm convinced the opening was just snatched from a generic Lifetime drama movie about school bullying). You can actually see the seams where each writer was taking their own script before someone merged them all together. One writer wanted a movie about the parents being abusive to their deformed daughter and then murdering someone to hide their dark family secret - at which point the mercy to spiders callback would have made perfect sense as the sister was a victim of abuse and only looked monstrous while the parents were the real monsters. Another writer wanted a movie about abuse and parental denial leading to mental illness escalating into violence. And the final one wanted a basic spider girl monster movie. Whoever merged these three scripts needs to sit in the corner and think about what they did, because they simply do not work together. Any of the three individual scripts would have been serviceable, but all mashed together they just made a gross mess that says nothing.

great vid as always thank you for making wonderful content :)

This reminds me of the movie let the right one in (or let me in for the English version) similar in nature but way better

I have not seen Cobweb, but I gotta say, it has a good title. It reminds me of spiders, which I like, and are scary.