CRAWL (2019)
Crawl is twelve minutes shorter than Rogue. So I'm tackling Crawl. Normally, I wouldn't let you in on my selection process, but you should know that I'm just as brainless as the movies that I review. Perhaps that's unfair. This flick does have a brain. It has the heart, however, of a French "survival horror" endurance test from about fifteen years earlier. It was directed by Alexandre Aja, and it feels more like his High Tension than Alligator. But is that a good thing or a bad thing? From where I'm sitting, it's merely a thing. It does hit strange to watch a gritty, ultra-realistic take on the "nature runs amok" subgenre. To that end, I was reminded of 1977's Day of the Animals. Again, that's neither good nor bad. Crawl tells the simple story of a woman checking on her father during a hurricane. Tempestuous flooding forces them into the crawlspace where they butt heads with a deadly mongoose. Kidding! There are gators afoot and afloat. What happens when the levee breaks? If only it was just a Led Zeppelin song.
Crawl's sizeable budget allows for polished special effects that extend to cool, atmospheric shots of inclement weather. Sometimes, stormclouds are creepier than monsters. The characters are sympathetic, but bits of exposition that develop their backstories come across as forced. I get it, though. There are only so many ways to establish that two people have a fractured relationship. Thankfully, the acting from Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper is on-point. Props to the stunt crew. This couldn't have been an easy film to shoot. It makes me wonder what other reptile romps would have been able to accomplish with the same amount of money. In any event, Crawl is a suspenseful, well-structured sit at the cinema. If I'm being honest, I prefer Alligator and Lake Placid. There is something to be said for cult appeal. Recommended for fans of Doppler radars.
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