Main cast: Frankie Muniz (Jonathan Marsh), Blake Webb (Eric), Chelsea Edmundson (Dena), Richard Handley (Dr Jason Ronaldi), Ravi Patel (Dr May), Colby French (Mr Marsh), Laura Richardson (Mrs Marsh), Mary K DeVault (Melinda), Jackie Moore (Lollypop), Bret Green (Fit Guy Chad), Jenny Strubin (Winter), Sharif Ibrahim (Orderly Wally), Angie DeGrazia (The Wife), and Alexander Ward (The Entity)
Director: Brian Hanson

Poor Jonathan. He works as a store checkout guy, which isn’t the most happening job around. He doesn’t want to talk to his parents, and he’s clearly very lonely. When he’s not running until he throws up, he stays in at his apartment, drawing various things in his art pads. Okay, don’t feel too sorry for him because there’s no way a mere store worker can afford to rent a nice, big place like that – maybe his parents are wealthy, I don’t know. At any rate, things are finally looking up – ahem – when he calls up a singles hotline and picks up Dena, who proceeds to seduce him. It is great, and… she vanishes the morning after, and a nasty-looking burning rash breaks out around Jonathan’s waist to crotch region.

I suppose one can say that The Black String is some kind of cautionary tale about having unprotected sex with strangers, but the script by director Brian Hanson and Richard Handley attempts to weave a supernatural element around that rash. There is an almost cosmic horror kind of vibe here, as poor Jonathan is now marked by the rash, and some very unpleasant folks are coming to harvest the crop, so to speak, that is spreading slowly inside our poor guy.

Frankie Muniz puts on a pretty solid performance too as poor Malcolm Wilkerson all grown up and still trying to make sense of a crazy world, and he effortlessly switches nuances and tics in a believable manner so much so that Jonathan can go from funny to sympathetic to pathetic and back again.

So, why only two oogies for this movie? Well, while the premise has potential, the execution is like water being on permanent simmer, never reaching boiling point. The pacing is static. Jonathan spends a lot of time running around and dealing with disbelieving people, so much so that there are times when the movie seems to forget that it is supposed to be a horror film. It is one thing if the movie wanted to portray life in a mundane suburb as a form of nightmare, but that’s not what it seems to have set out to do. The rash thing would lead me to believe that there would be some body horror down the road. The whole cult and harvest thing have me wondering whether I will get a cosmic horror film too. Instead, I get only scenes of poor Jonathan running around in a futile circle, being hounded by skeptical friends, family members, doctors, et cetera.

When the climactic moment happens, I barely react because it is filmed as if it was another apparently random nightmare scene – I half expect Jonathan would wake up and start trying to escape the hospital yet again. Then the movie really ends, and I’m left thinking that the whole thing has been one long anticlimactic experience.

The Black String is definitely a textbook example of a squandered opportunity.