There are bad horror films, and then there’s Crack in the Floor. This is the kind of movie that makes you long for the sweet release of the end credits, or possibly a frontal lobotomy to speed things along. On paper, it sounds like your standard “city kids in the woods” slasher. In practice, it’s a bizarre patchwork of overacting, underacting, and Gary Busey being Gary Busey, which is to say, deeply terrifying in ways unrelated to the script.
The Premise: Don’t Leave the Basement, Ever
The movie centers on Jeremiah Hill (Roger Hewlett), a man who has been living alone for 33 years after watching his mother (Tracy Scoggins) get brutally raped and murdered in front of him. Trauma, check. Isolation, check. Creepy backwoods psycho setup, check. But instead of delivering a chilling descent into madness, the movie plays like an after-school special about why therapy is important. Jeremiah lives in a cabin in the woods, and if you stumble onto his property, you’re basically signing your own death certificate.
That’s the gist. That’s also the whole plot. You’d think 90 minutes of people wandering into the woods and dying would at least have some bite. Unfortunately, Crack in the Floor has all the tension of a kindergarten Easter egg hunt where half the eggs are missing and the other half are filled with raisins.
The Victims: Pretty, Dumb, and Disposable
Enter Lehman (Mario Lopez) and his five friends from Los Angeles. Yes, that’s right, Mario Lopez. A man who went from Saved by the Bell to this cinematic skid mark. Lehman and his group head into the woods for a camping trip, and if you’ve seen literally any horror film since 1978, you already know what happens next:
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They meet creepy locals (played by Gary Busey and Rance Howard).
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They ignore every possible warning sign.
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They wander too close to Jeremiah’s personal space.
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They get picked off like flies at a picnic.
The friends are so bland that I forgot their names the moment they were introduced. They exist solely to pad the body count, which might have been fine if their deaths were interesting. But Crack in the Floor can’t even manage creative kills. It’s all stabbings and hackings, filmed like the cameraman was drunk and possibly trapped under a log.
Gary Busey: The Real Horror Show
The highlight—if you can call it that—is Gary Busey as Tyler Trout, a local who exists to chew scenery and confuse the audience. Busey’s performance is less “acting” and more “Busey wandered onto the set and they kept rolling.” He delivers every line like he’s trying to exorcise a demon through his uvula. At one point he rambles about fish and the great outdoors with the intensity of a man describing his grocery list after ten Red Bulls.
It’s hard to say whether Busey makes the film better or worse, but he certainly makes it weirder. Honestly, they should’ve just scrapped the rest of the cast and let Gary Busey and a taxidermy moose carry the whole movie.
Mario Lopez: From Bayside to Backwoods
Mario Lopez’s Lehman is supposed to be the “leader” of the group, but his performance makes Zack Morris look like Daniel Day-Lewis. He spends most of the film looking vaguely annoyed, like he’s trying to remember if he left his car windows down. There’s zero charisma, zero chemistry with his friends, and zero chance you’ll care whether he lives or dies.
Lopez must’ve done this movie as some kind of cosmic dare, because nothing about it suggests a man trying to advance his acting career. If anything, it’s a PSA about why you shouldn’t leave Hollywood to film in the woods with Gary Busey.
Jeremiah Hill: The Least Scary Psycho Ever
Jeremiah, our killer, is essentially a Dollar Store Jason Voorhees. He skulks, he mutters, he kills. But Hewlett plays him with all the menace of a mall security guard who just found someone shoplifting a Hot Topic keychain. The filmmakers clearly want him to be tragic and terrifying—a victim of trauma turned monster—but instead he feels like an awkward uncle who lives in your garage and tells ghost stories that end with, “…and then it was just a raccoon.”
Even his kills are boring. If you’re going to base your entire movie on one killer in a cabin, at least give him some flair. A crack in the floor that actually does something, maybe? Nope. The “crack in the floor” is just a metaphor—or worse, a title they picked after realizing they’d already called the movie “Jeremiah in the Woods” on the clapperboard.
Sheriff Not-So-Great
Bo Hopkins plays Sheriff Talmidge, the lawman who apparently runs the world’s most boring small town. His deputy, Kevin Gordon (Stephen Saux), looks perpetually lost, like he stumbled in from a sitcom audition. These two bumbling law enforcers represent the “outside world,” but they’re so useless you almost root for Jeremiah to take them out, too.
Cinematography: The Real Crack in the Floor
The movie looks like it was filmed on a camcorder borrowed from a high school AV club. Shots linger too long, action sequences cut too fast, and the lighting suggests that half the budget went to flashlight batteries. The “scary” moments are either too dark to see or too bright to take seriously. At one point, Jeremiah’s big reveal happens in lighting so flat you could mistake it for a cooking show.
The Soundtrack: Generic Suspense Noises
If you enjoy stock “dun-dun-dun” horror music and violins that sound like they’re being played by an arthritic raccoon, you’re in luck. The soundtrack is pure royalty-free cheese. It’s the kind of background noise you’d expect in a Halloween store when you step on a motion-sensor skeleton.
The Pacing: Death by Boredom
The biggest sin of Crack in the Floor isn’t bad acting or bad writing—it’s that it’s boring. Horror can be campy, it can be gory, it can be stupid. But it should never be dull. And yet here we are, trapped in a 90-minute slog where the scares never land and the suspense never builds.
Characters talk. They walk. They die. Repeat. By the time the credits rolled, I was rooting for the crack in my living room ceiling to open and swallow me whole.
Final Thoughts: Seal This Crack Permanently
Crack in the Floor is a horror movie that forgot the horror. Or the movie. It’s a tedious mix of clichés, half-baked performances, and Gary Busey’s unhinged rambling. The only crack worth mentioning is the one in the quality control process that let this thing get released.
If you’re looking for backwoods horror, go watch The Hills Have Eyes. If you want creepy cabins, go watch Evil Dead. If you want Mario Lopez, just stick with Saved by the Bell. Because this? This is a crack you don’t want to fall into.
