Crew
Director – Anthony C. Ferrante, Screenplay – Skyler Caleb, Anthony C. Ferrante, Woodrow Wilson Hancock III & James Zimbardi, Producer – Woodrow Wilson Hancock III, Photography – Ryan Broomberg, Music – Christopher Cano, Alan Howarth & Chris Ridenhour, Creature & Makeup Effects – Vincent Guastini, Makeup – Monique Paredes, Production Design – Syd Richardson. Production Company – All Roads Productions/Midnight Productions.
Cast
James Zimbardi (Jack Coyle), Dee Wallace (Donna Coyle), Niesha Renee Guilbot (Zoey), Angie Teodora Dick (Liz), Skyler Caleb (Lucas Coyle), Angela Cole (Steffie), Michael Paré (Idris), Tej Limlas Ly (Nix), Emily Killian (Young Donna), Angelina Karo (Tessa Coyle), Ethan Daly (Young Jack), Aidan Rhys (Young Lucas)
Plot
While on a family outing up to the lake, eight-year-old Tessa Coyle goes into the water to retrieve a baseball but disappears. Twenty years later, the Coyle family still feel scars from what happened with the mother Donna obsessively holding birthday parties for the child she believes is going to be found. At the latest birthday party, Lucas has hallucinations about something in the house and then kills himself. On a journey up to the lake to scatter his ashes, the creature inside the water that snatched Tessa emerges once more. Now the family are forced to face the horrors of the past again.
Anthony C. Ferrante is the director who will always be known as the man behind the Sharknado franchise. Ferrante started the series with Sharknado (2013) and went on to make five sequels with Sharknado 2: The Second One (2014), Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! (2015), Sharknado: The 4th Awakens (2016), Sharknado 5: Global Swarming (2017) and The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time (2018). Ferrante is a former writer for Fangoria magazine and a makeup effects supervisor who has worked on numerous B horror films. Before Sharknado, he made his directorial debut with the haunted house film Boo (2005), followed by Headless Horseman (2007), Hansel & Gretel (2013), Forgotten Evil (2017), Zombie Tidal Wave (2019), Time Pirates (2022), Blind Waters (2023), Dante’s Hotel (2023), Great White Waters (2025) and Water Park Shark (2026).
Outside of the Sharknado films, Ferrante’s career has been uneven. Indeed, as can evidently be seen in Nix, without the film being a bad movie that draws attention to itself in quote marks and taking nothing seriously as increasingly became the case with the Sharknado sequels, Ferrante doesn’t have much to draw on as a director. Nix has been afforded a middling budget and Ferrante is forced to deploy standard directorial tactics.
Nix alas disappears off into bland insipidity and utterly sedate pacing. In the latter half, there is a good deal of running around with the appearances of the Nix creature. In addition, there is much in the way of there again/gone again reality and illusion jumps. All of this blurs into a tedious sameness. There is nothing about Nix that defines it as anything other than a completely routine direct-to-streaming horror movie. The scenes where Skyler Caleb (also one of the writers) has hallucinations before discovering he has killed himself in the bath are the sort of shabby tricks that a rank amateur would pull.
Genre veteran Dee Wallace is the only one of two recognisable name and at least lets all stops go in her performance. The other recognisable name present is Michael Paré in a role that could have ended on the cutting room floor for all the difference it makes to the film.
Trailer here