A nerve-shredding survival story declared dead on arrival by critics gets slowly dragged to its sludgy doom on streaming

Thanks entirely to movies and TV shows, there’s at least one generation out there who assumed quicksand would factor into their lives a great deal more than it actually does; which is to say not at all, except in truly outlandish circumstances. It’s been a storytelling staple for decades, which makes you wonder why it took so long for the aptly-named Quicksand to turn it into the basis for a horror film.

Presumably, the answer might have something to do with the fact that being slowly dragged to a suffocating demise in beige sludge while remaining entirely stationary doesn’t come across as the most exciting of conceits for a full-length feature, which may go some way to explaining why director Andres Beltran’s chiller could only muster Rotten Tomatoes scores of 36 and 21 percent from critics and crowds.

The narrative focuses on a married couple on the brink of divorce, who embark on a hike through the Colombian rainforest, which sounds like an unusual method of trying to repair a fractured union to say the least, only for the pair to find themselves trapped in the titular plot device and forced to work together in an effort not to be sucked slowly into the palpable ooze determined to vanish them forevermore.

The potential is definitely there, and there are a couple of admittedly exciting and nerve-shredding set pieces, but nowhere near enough to sustain even a brief 86-minute running time. Regardless, though, FlixPatrol outing Quicksand as a Top 10 hit on iTunes in multiple countries has shown that people are going to watch it anyway, because that’s what happens when horror hits on-demand.