Directed by Alexandre Aja

Starring Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper

Crawl is pretty much what it sells itself to be: a thrill ride creature feature about a father and daughter trapped in their family house’s crawl space (get it?), surrounded by some hungry alligators. At 87 minutes, it is brisk and as short as it needs to be. The film is not great by any means, but it’s a fun little low budget horror that isn’t pretending to be more than what it is. I went to see it tonight cause there seems to be nothing good out, and my growing anxiety about not seeing enough in theaters got the better of me. But, you know, I like seeing what filmmakers can do with little budgets and maybe not much of a script. It’s much better than being disappointed over and over. The Lion King remake opens next week, and all signs point to that being the worst movie we’re all going to collectively see in a very long time. You can see why I chose the gators
I expected absolutely nothing from this movie, and I was entertained, and scared, a decent amount of its runtime. It does drag just a little at times, as they spent almost the entire movie in that crawl space. But it’s cool seeing them figure a way out of every disastrous situation that falls on them. Eventually, they make it out of the house, only to be forced back in. But the gators are pretty scary, and Kaya Scodelario held my attention for almost all of it. She’s pretty awesome, giving a good lead performance in a movie fucking called Crawl, and with the help of an adorable dog.
The earlier scenes show that our lead Haley is a competitive swimmer. Quick flashbacks show that her father (Barry Pepper) was her coach, and pushed her to excel at it. He calls her an apex predator, Hey just like Chronicle. I think Hollywood is running out of ideas.
While at a swim meet, Haley barely loses. Leaving with the loss, she gets told by her sister Beth over the phone that there is a category 5 hurricane on its way to Florida. She warns her to get out, but also that dad hasn’t been answering her calls. And she suspects he’ll try and ride out the storm. Haley goes to look for him.
The Florida police try to stop her, but she finds a way around the evacuation routes to her dad’s place. But he isn’t there. Instead she finds his dog Sugar, who is so cute and harmless you know the movie cannot kill her. Where could he be then? She decides to check their old family home, even though he had told her he sold it.
His car’s parked out front, but as she calls out for him all over the house, there’s no answer. Sugar barks and hones her attention on the basement. Haley knows she’s gotta go down there. The movie spends a good chunk of time having her crawl down here, in the muddy and low crawl space. She does find her dad, knocked out on the far end of the space. He’s still breathing, but blood all along his shoulder reveals a nasty bite mark. What the hell bit him? Enter Gator # 1, whose first appearance did make me jump, but also wince at how obviously cgi he is. I worried big time if they were all gonna look like this. Thankfully the movie’s creatures get more believable. Lots of cgi, and maybe some dummy alligators.
Aside from this kinda lame first shot of it, the gators in the rest of the movie do look convincing. A great shot later just focuses through the vicious mouth of one of them, as it keeps it open threateningly to the side of a trapped Haley. That’s after she’s stabbed his eye out with a screwdriver btw. Crawl is bloody, and super gory at times. Enough to rightly earn its R rating. You’ll see more than one bone snapping, and people getting eating alive. It’s the little things
I’m more surprised at how injured our two leads get. I couldn’t believe how Haley gets a chunk of her leg bitten into, and tossed around much earlier on than I thought I’d see a scene like that. And what happens to Barry Pepper is just, yeesh.
But I didn’t mention that they were estranged. Haley had blamed herself for her parent’s divorce, attributing it to her dad always being with her for swim practice instead of being with her mom. This is about as deep as a movie like this is going to get. But it leads to kind of a touching moment between them.
Crawl isn’t going to wow you, or satisfy some things movies always should. But it has got its moments of terror and gore. And some obvious tributes to Jaws. And the dog is just so adorable, and Kaya is awesome. I wish there had been more for her to do. A little bit more of something there. It feels like it’s missing a terrifying sequence, and maybe one or two more characters that play their parts, or just get maimed. But overall I suppose I didn’t regret seeing it