Crawl is a new creature feature with a very direct, very simple premise that has been getting very good critical reviews. Reviews are positive, I think, because the movie is well made, short and to the point, and it is what it is. It’s a movie about alligators attacking people and has no pretenses otherwise. I respect that myself and was hoping to dig the flick… but it has a few logical fatal flaws that kept taking me out of the movie.
The movie is an interesting combination of creature (alligator) feature and disaster film. A hurricane is hitting Florida and a woman (who is a competitive swimmer) goes to her family home to find her dad. He’s in the crawlspace beneath the house along with a very angry alligator and there’s no way out. Then the levees break and the basement starts to flood.
And right there is my first problem… they call it a crawlspace but it’s practically a full unfinished basement. In Florida. Which is rare. But I guess an actual life-size crawlspace would make for difficult filming. Fine. But there’s also decorative cross-shaped holes in the concrete looking out onto the street… and water is flooding in from them. I’m not sure if this makes any sense to have opening for water to flood your non-basement. But also the humans have tools – at least a shovel – that they could use to break through those concrete walls but they don’t. Then they reveal, once the flooding is really bad, there’s a storm outlet that’s big enough to fit a person – and a huge alligator – that leads right into the basement/crawlspace. Big enough for a burglar to just wiggle into the house (since there’s a door and steps leading down into the “crawlspace”).
OK fine – so the movie’s logic doesn’t hold firm. That’s usually not a deal breaker in a goofy goony horror flick. Fine… except this movie is based around the conceit of being trapped in this tight space so they owe it to the audience to make sure their basic premise even makes sense and works. And they fail that on such a fundamental level, it’s hard to really get into the suspense.
All that said, the movie is otherwise well crafted and well acted. The shots of Florida during in hurricane are very convincing but I figured they were CGI enhanced backdrops that just looked fantastic. And I was right… the movie was filmed in Serbia. Serbia for Florida… isn’t that what everyone does? But it worked and was convincing so credit to them.
As far as scares go, there were a few “alligator pops out” moments that were jump-in-your-seat worthy. Sure, they are just jump scares but gators are ambush predators so I can forgive the movie for that, at least. The sense of isolation and desperation as the house floods is well done. The water effects are also scary and surely the actors were happy to just get to dry off every once in a great while.
So this movie is a real mixed bag. If you can just let the situational and set design issues go and stop worrying about the severity of the animal bites, then you’ll probably like the movie. I think it’s a good enough, reasonably effective movie for what it’s trying to be. And it’s got no pretensions beyond being a short, direct creature feature and I applaud it for that. But then boo it for its core issues. I couldn’t get past the “you had one job” issue where there’s far too many logic holes in their core concept.
Score: 77