A young woman, while attempting to save her father during a category 5 hurricane, finds herself trapped in a flooding house and must fight for her life against alligators.
As a film critic, one of the perks is getting to see movies before they are released to the public. Typically, when a film doesn’t secure a press screening in advance of its release date, it’s never a good sign, either the movie is not very good or the studio lost faith in it and decided to just dump it on the movie-going public. When “Crawl” was deprived of a press screening, I figured the movie must not be very good but on the contrary, it was highly enjoyable. Alexandre Aja’s directing credits, including “High Tension,” the 2006 remake of “The Hills Have Eyes,” “Mirrors,” and the cheesy but fun “Piranha 3D,” prove that Mr. Aja has the technical prowess to deliver tense and at times, frightening films but that he also doesn’t take himself too seriously. The plot for “Crawl” is most certainly by-the-numbers but its two leads, Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper, prove that they have the acting chops necessary for us to believe in their predicament, no matter how outlandish it occasionally becomes.
Haley (Scodelario) is attending the University of Florida when she receives a phone call from her sister letting her know that a Category 5 hurricane is heading towards Florida. When she tries to call her father, Dave (Barry Pepper), to make him aware of the situation, he doesn’t answer his phone. After a few more attempts, she becomes worried and decides to drive down to him, against the instructions of the state police who have advised everyone to evacuate. When she reaches his house, he is nowhere to be found, although his dog is safely inside. Searching for him in and around the house, she cannot locate him and decides to drive to the house they all used to live in before her mother and father divorced. She discovers his pickup truck parked outside but he is nowhere to be found. Making her way into the crawl space underneath the house, she finds her father unconscious and badly wounded. As she tries to drag his body out, she is cut off by a large alligator and manages to haul his body back to its original resting place, which is safe from the alligator as it is too big to fit underneath the pipes above them.
Haley tries several different times to find a way out but quickly learns that there are two alligators in the crawl space. As the hurricane intensifies, bringing with it more rain, slowly, the crawl space begins to flood. As Dave finally wakes up, he is angry with Haley that she came looking for him instead of leaving but she insists that he would have done the same for her. With time running out, Haley reaches a hatch in the ceiling in the far corner of the crawl space that will take her to the living room above but try as she may, she cannot budge the door, leading her to believe that something upstairs is blocking the hatch. She investigates a nearby storm drain and ascertains that the alligators have been using this conduit to move in and out of the house and she unearths a large nest filled with alligator eggs. As the nearby levees break, causing more flooding, Haley realizes the only way to escape and rescue her father, is through the storm drain and so she must venture down the pipeline and hope that no more alligators are using it.
“Crawl” offers nothing new to this particular monster-movie genre in terms of overall narrative, we’ve seen it all before in films like “Primeval,” “Rogue,” “Lake Placid,” and “Crocodile,” but what it does have going for it, is deft direction and convincing performances by Ms. Scodelario and Mr. Pepper. Haley isn’t the stereotypical horror protagonist that does stupid things that only transpire in horror movies, like going into a dark, creepy basement when she should be running out the front door, here, she ventures into the dark, creepy crawl space underneath her old house out of genuine concern for her father, not because she heard a creak and felt some implausible desire to go and investigate. There are a few moments of horror but they happen so fast, they barely have time to register with you until they are over, and those instances stay with you longer because they happened so quickly and didn’t linger on the gore. “Crawl” is a tense-filled horror-thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat and forces you to occasionally check underneath, you know, just in case!
Now available on Blu-ray, DVD & On-Demand
