Crawl

Starring: Kaya Scodelario, Barry Pepper

Director: Alexandre Aja

Crawl sees director Alexandre Aja teaming up with producer Sam Raimi, trading the piranhas from his last creature feature Piranha 3D with alligators (and a category 5 hurricane). That premise alone had me excited when I saw the first trailer, but I kept feeling this dread that maybe Crawl would suck. My fear wasn’t unfounded. Paramount put Crawl’s release date after a string of other horror movies (Annabelle Comes Home, Child’s Play, Midsommar) and a week before Disney’s The Lion King absolutely annihilates the box office. Sure it's “counter programming,” but some things are so big they just swallow everything up or drown them in a death roll (get it? Like a gator…never mind). Add the fact that it wasn’t screened for critics, and it looked like a dud for sure.

I am happy to report my worries were unfounded. This is a film as lean and mean as it's antagonists, an 87-minute summer movie amusement park ride that wastes no time getting in and absolutely no time getting out (the first shot of the movie has the hurricane already rolling in).

The premise is mercifully simple. Haley (Kaya Scodelario) doesn’t get along with her dad (Barry Pepper), but after her sister says that he hasn’t been answering his phone, she decides to go check on him… during a massive hurricane. Good news is Haley finds her dad in the basement of her childhood home with the help of his dog Sugar, bad news is he’s injured and they aren’t alone, as a storm drain to a nearby water way has let in some uninvited, toothy guests. They can use the geography under the house to stay safe (they can wiggle under and around pipes that the predators can’t), but they won’t be for long, as the basement slowly fills with water.

Underneath this house, which is more a crawlspace than a basement (and where most of the movie takes place), Aja proves that high tension was not only the name of his break out hit, but his guiding principle. Crawl treats its gators like a mixture of a shark and the t-rex/raptors from Jurassic Park. I had never really thought of it before, but this movie made me realize that alligators are super scary (I am also afraid of being caught in a hurricane). In this basement, gators have the advantage because they already move close to the ground, and that is before the water gets high enough that they are able to swim. The alligators also look excellent, as rendered by Rodeo FX. They look like a mixture of CGI and practical, but one can’t be too sure these days. Either way, they absolutely look like they exist in their space and could cause significant bodily harm.

These basement sequences are the most effective as Haley and her dad try different plans to get out of the room and evade the alligators. It is also where the worst parts of the movie take place. For some reason, in the midst of all this insanity, they stop for a bit to work out some of their family issues (get it, they are literally under the family home). Logically, it seems like the worst time to work through your issues, and yet I forgive the movie this fault, as it doesn’t last long and where else were they going to shove character stuff when the film moves so fast.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Haley gets out of the basement eventually and faces what has to be the worst luck of any human being ever. It almost makes Crawl proof of a higher power since some cosmic force WANTS HER DEAD. Yet she perseveres and with Scodelario’s warrior performance it becomes exciting, intense, and even uplifting. Also, she has to play “the floor is lava” but in a house full of water with gators in it and handle wounds that would for sure sideline any human being! I do wish that things had gotten a bit crazier by the end, but for a 13 million dollar movie shot in a month using Serbia as a stand in for Florida, you have to cut it some slack.

“Do the gators eat anyone?” one might ask since I have only mentioned two humans and a dog. Why yes they do. Outside of the house, there is a string of characters thrown in with the sole purpose of being demolished by some big boy reptiles. It is also quite gory, as Aja didn’t start in the extreme French horror movement by accident.

Crawl is exactly the kind of movie that the world needs mid-July. It is an original property, not based on anything else, that is short, streamlined, serious enough to offer white-knuckled thrills, but not so much that it isn’t fun, and is what it sets out to be. Is it unrealistically wild? Sure, but so is Florida.

Grade: B+ (as it is an elevated B movie)