Crawl (2019)

Movie Info

This is my turf!

Haley Keller (Kaya Scodelario) is a swimmer always pushing herself harder.  When a massive hurricane threatens Florida, Haley seeks out her father Dave (Barry Pepper) who went to check on their old home.  Haley finds her father injured and discover that like him, she is trapped in the flooding crawlspace of the house by a massive alligator.  The water is coming in and the hurricane is getting stronger…getting out alive is getting harder!

Directed by Alexandre Aja, Crawl is an animal-attack horror thriller.  The movie was released to relatively positive reviews and a strong box office.

I’m a sucker for animal based horror films.  Animals are unpredictable and reptiles are often even more unpredictable than something like a bear or lion.  With relatively positive reviews, I gave Crawl a chance…and for the most part, I’m glad I did.

See you later, alligator!

The movie starts out good.  The basic absurd set-up of the plot did relatively make sense.  The characters becoming trapped by an alligator also is logical, but then the movie starts to go a bit sideways.  I realize there is the extenuating circumstances of the hurricane pushing more alligators into the area, but from what little I know about alligators, they don’t seem to usually behave the way in the movie.  Yeah, they’ll defend a nest which she finds, but so many big alligators in such a small area seems unlikely…plus, they are often rather skitterish.  The movie has the characters being attacked again and again and again (and the aggressive alligators always stop at the water’s edge).

Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper do a good job as the family menaced by the alligators.  There is of course a whole backstory of why their relationship is fragile, and it seems kind of petty during a fight for survival when they have some discussions.  There are a number of sacrificial lambs in the movie (aka characters introduced just to be eaten) and that too feels a bit unnecessary, and I think that people from that area would be smarter than to wade around waters potentially filled with alligators.

I feel this is pretty misleading…there is a mostly walking by this point and the alligators are swimming…need more crawling

The movie looks pretty decent.  The animated alligators are real enough to be believable and the claustrophobic quarters combined with potential drowning moments also amp up the horror.  The movie just goes on and on with more and more ways to push the alligators on the people.

Crawl is a fun popcorn movie.  It feels a lot like the recently released shark film The Shallows which also is fun.  I do think that the filmmakers potentially ran out of ideas during the course of the screenwriting, but the movie keeps motoring on enough that it is relatively forgivable.  The characters are extremely tough since they get bitten multiple times by the gators and survive so I’m full expecting more crisis to befall the cast if Crawl 2 is released.