Image courtesy of wallpapersden.com
As I mentioned in the intro of the Deep Blue Sea review, there is another movie that came out the same month of its Anniversary. It’s another creature feature, albeit a more recent one, but it does the same thing that made Deep Blue Sea so effective: Build up the scares, and have creatures that are scary enough already to encounter in real life just pop out when you least expect it in ways that actually work. With Deep Blue Sea, it was sharks. This time it’s alligators, in the best thriller of the year by far: Crawl.
The story follows a woman named Haley Keller who hasn’t heard from her father Dave for sometime. To make matters worse, a Category 5 hurricane hits Florida, so she goes to the family’s old house to try to find him and get him out. However, while she does manage to find him in the crawl space, the area is not only slowly flooding… vicious alligators have found their way in.
What Worked: The acting is really good, especially from Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper*. They have great chemistry as father and daughter, too, and there are also some moments that make you really feel for them. There’s that sense of dread and you want to see them make it out alive.
The creature effects are fantastic in this movie, particularly this one shot involving a close-up of a gator’s eye. Whenever the gators show up, they look great, and there’s one part that looks as excellent as the aforementioned eye shot. It involves one corner of the crawl space, which is as best I can put it without giving too much away. It also involves something else crawling on, rather than in, someone’s skin. It’s one of the most unsettling scenes here aside from the gator attacks and kills.
Also, Alexandre Aja ends up being the perfect choice to direct this movie, as he’s had experience with creature features before, and ones that embrace their crazy stories; for evidence of that, look at his version of Piranha.
Now let’s get to the meat of this movie (no pun intended). The gator attack scenes are so brutal, and I don’t just mean the kills. You see people get thrashed around like rag dolls, with Haley’s first gator encounter being the most intense one, as well as bone fractures.
If those don’t make you wince, the kills certainly will. Be on the lookout for one involving a cop… not the one in the trailer, but one shortly after that.
This leads me to another thing that Aja did so well with Piranha that he does again here: He knows how to do shock value, and especially gore, properly. Unlike most other horror directors who tend to put them in for the sake of having them in the movie, he builds them up, and then uses them when you least expect it. As a result, you’re constantly on edge.
He handles the scares in the same way. Yes, there are jump scares, but they all felt genuine to me. I did not spot a single false alarm** jump scare. Even the background scares will have you on edge, like one in the same scene with the goriest death in the movie.
The score and cinematography are also very good.
What Didn’t Work: Some of the scares you may see coming, where you can call who’s going to die in those scenes almost immediately. There are some stupid decisions here as well, but they’re minimal at best.
I also had a minor issue with how it ended. It was satisfying, but then it just cut to black when it did and the credits began rolling. I would have liked for it to go on for maybe another couple minutes or so. That’s really it in terms of flaws, though.
Overall: If you’re looking for something to see on Friday night, with as big an audience as possible, Crawl is the movie for you. It’s intense, it’s scary, it’s gory as can be, but it’s also a lot of fun. Besides, while you may see some of the scares coming… how they happen, you definitely won’t, and the characters are very resourceful for the most part. It’s easily one of the year’s biggest surprises, and it might be my pick for Best Thriller by the end of the year, unless another thriller somehow finds a way to top it.
*In a Maze Runner reunion, by the way.
**That’s the term used to describe cheap jump scares, the biggest example being whenever an animal (usually a cat) jumps out from the shadows and runs across the room.