2019 Paramount Pictures Corporation
I’ve mentioned before that I am a big fan of the creature feature style of horror movies. If it involves some kind of animal rampaging, I will give it a watch. After receiving a recommendation from my friend, I decided to give Crawl a try.
Crawl was released earlier his year and stars Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper as the leads. It follows a father, daughter and their dog when they get trapped in a flooding crawlspace in the middle of a hurricane. Oh and there are alligators.
It’s a fairly tense film right from the start. The impending hurricane accompanied by a relative who won’t answer their phone automatically makes things uneasy for the audience, even without the knowledge of impending gators.
One of the reoccurring features of this type of film is that they typically feature a small group of human survivors who dwindle down to one or two. Having the film start with such a limited cast is beneficial as it allows the audience to build a greater investment in their survival. The father and daughter dynamic between Scodelario and Pepper is enjoyable to watch, presenting as more genuine than some film families. There’s a nice balance of love and painful history between them.
When I started the film, I was unsure if it was going to be a multiple alligator scenario and also if the humans were going to have a whole house to hide in, or just the crawlspace. I was quite pleased when it became clear that they were trapped beneath the house after one of the alligators took out the stairs. The confined space only adds to the tenseness, providing an air of claustrophobia that only builds as it slowly fills with water. Having to wriggle through an environment that is not forgiving on a human body, especially once the alligators are added and injuries are sustained, is nightmarish. There’s also the ticking clock element brought on by the flooding just to make sure the audience really knows how screwed the protagonists are.
The alligators themselves are decent. They have an air of cgi to them but it’s not too distracting, fortunately. It helps that after their initial introduction to establish their presence, they are seen only in parts - a tail here, a snapping jaw there. The kills that are featured are mostly done quite well, with the exception of one that features a whole army of CGI alligators (although I did like that it showed the alligators rolling to tear their victim apart, that was a nice touch). The filmmakers liberally employed the Jaws technique of first person underwater camera to show when they hunted which is a little over done, but they also presented the kills in different ways. My two favourites were one done as a background event and another that the audience sees via a reflection. It made a nice change from the more blood heavy films, choosing to focus on tension rather than gore.
I’m still somewhat uncertain about how many alligators there were actually supposed to be. It starts with one, establishes a second and that there are more outside. There’s also a moment where Scodelario’s character finds some broken eggshells in the overflow pipe that the animals used to enter the house but there’s only one baby shown and it’s not really made clear how long they’ve been there, making it difficult to determine the stakes alligator-wise.
The scene with the overflow pipe was probably the best in the film. The alligator nest is beautifully horrific to look at and the narrow pipe, completely flooded with the threat of predators at either end, is a nail-biting moment. I am slightly confused as to why their overflow pipe apparently connected to an alligator farm but that’s something I chose to ignore, along with the fact that a girl can apparently outswim an alligator and that they also can’t see someone bleeding beside them as long as they’re motionless.
If this movie has one flaw, it’s that it refuses to end and gets a little silly near the end. It goes from the crawl space, to the flooded street, to a boat, to a flooded house, to a shower cubicle (and then to even more locations). It got to the point where I was starting to feel like the filmmakers had too many ideas for the ending, so just decided to use all of them.
Overall, a good film that I would watch again but that I’d probably skip the last twenty minutes of.
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