By Brad Munson (The Dark Multiverse of Stephen King)
For all its splashing, thrashing, and–quietly literally–gnashing, Crawl is something of a relief. Make no mistake, this latest entry in the Animal as Monster horror/action subgenre that slithers all the way back to Jaws and beyond is intense. But it’s simple, too, in the best possible way: you’ve got a couple of characters you care about fighting to survive a big, relentless hungry animal with time running out. Will they live or die? Hang on to find out.
It’s straightforward, it’s linear, is easy to follow. You’ve got a tough college girl, a swimmer at UF Gainesville, who goes to fetch her estranged father before a big-ass hurricane hits, and ends up in a crumbling, flooding house with a wounded Dad and an alligator. Check that, a whole bunch of alligators. And really, that’s all you need to know. It’s the Florida Swamp. In a hurricane. It’s alligators, man. Enjoy.
Directed by Alexandre Aja, who gave us one of The Hills Have Eyes movies and the exemplary (?) Piranha 3D almost ten years ago, this is a well-made action flick without a wasted breath or missed jump-scare. And Michael and Shawn Rasmussen, who gave us John Carpenter’s The Ward a few years back and wrote and directed The Inhabitants, know what they’re doing when it comes to high-tension action. But English actress Kaya Scodelario, who you may remember for the Maze Runner movies or one of the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks, is the one who really holds this movie together. She’s in virtually every scene, and brings a tough, smart, never-give-up credibility that transcends your basic Final Girl trope. (And if she isn’t an Olympics-level swimmer in real life, she sure looks like it.) She is tough, and the next time you get caught in a flooding house full of alligators, you’ll want her to be with you. The only other actor worth remembering is Barry Pepper, who’s one of Those Guys; he’s a stand-up pro whose face you’ll recognize from a million things, and who delivers the flawed-but-brave Dad role right when he needs to. There are other people in Crawl, too, but almost none of them are named and almost none of them have more than a few lines before…well, you know, chomp. Don’t get too attached.
Kaya Scodelario as Haley
Probably the spookiest thing about Crawl is its realism. Sure, there are plenty of lucky (and unlucky) breaks and coincidences, just as there should be, to keep the water churning red for 87 whole minutes, but the opening few scenes have an unintentional verisimilitude that’s chilling: we’re in an unidentified town on the eastern coast of Florida; there’s a huge hurricane bearing down on the Panhandle; people need to evacuate or risk being killed by the winds, rain, and storm surge. The timing is awesome and awful: if Hurricane Dorian had taken just a tiny hitch to the left, this would have more of a documentary than a horror movie. Lucky us, in more ways than one. But somehow we live to tell the tale another day.
Crawl has already made its modest $13 million budget back three times over; it’s about to slip out of movie theaters, but should be showing up in VOD any time now. You could do way worse than grabbing a copy, laying back with a beer, and enjoying the hell out of this fast-paced action-packed, extremely soggy creature feature. Just remember to keep your hands and feet inside the boat at all times…
