j* Movie Reviews 2019

Crawl (2019)

"Gator-cane" provides all the kick-arse-chick survivalist terror you didn't know you needed, then some.

Don't get me wrong, Shark-nado was an inspired and gloriously abstract premise. Like a pointillist painting or a Piss-Christ installation, 'Nado showed us a form of art we had never wondered about previously. Sharknado was one of those first fun sketches into a CGI world of combined beast and disaster.

But CRAWL, delivers a masterpiece in the art of survivalist terror. It take its beast, alligators, and its disaster, a hurricane, and combines them gorgeously in a form of "gator-cane" that is set for good measure in a "haunted" childhood home. It is selling this too broad to call it action-horror, for survivalist terror is a form more glorious than ghost-boxing. Survivalist terror must fall into the category of plausible rather than fantastical. This is nitty, gritty and dirty, with a heap of injury to boot.

By the end of this film I had that satisfying feeling of physical tenseness that comes from twitching and clenching and squirming in my chair at a wide variety of things. There were so many jump scares. I knew I was digging it when an attack I've seen no fewer than six times in the trailer still made me jump in the actual film. A real win for team spoilers-aint. I expected alligator chomping jump-scares, and got more than expected. For bonus points, this included heaps of cringey-pained-faces as the characters try to fix up a multitude of horrific bone breaks and gashes. To be fair the raw-nerves and broken bone ends are a big deal at the time, but the characters do have a bit of a tendency to walk, swim and crawl them off.

It's a film with a lot of primal vocalisation. There should be a special award for "grunt-acting" and these two would win best grunter and best-supporting grunter. The sheer range of frustrated and annoyed and injured non-verbal expression is excellent. Then there's all the Gator hissing and growling and roaring. And a dog with some extra things to woof, growl and whimper. Even when they are talking, our daughter-Daddy pair cut scathingly to facts in lieu of actual emotional communication.

Do you need to know the gist of the story? Girl heads home to check her dad isn't still hanging out in the swamp during the impending hurricane. He is. He's injured below the family house... in the you know, crawlspace. Flooding and Gators and storm surges oh my!

Once we arrive in the crawl-space, they don't waste much time cutting to the Gator good bits - this is no film for a slow monster reveal - it's a slasher or a chomper as the case may be. It starts chompy and gets chompier. Long story short, hurricanes are bad okay, evacuate when you're told to. They will not be able to come for you. 911 is dead. Survive, in terror, or don't. Gators don't care.

I loved the characters. I think Haley may well be the most powerful of the female names for Americans to say - this girl did remind me a bit of Haley Graham from Stick It. I loved the emotional sub-text of the family home and the alligators as metaphorical for the destruction of divorce. I loved the feelings of triumph. I loved the ongoing swim-coach metaphors. Apex Predator every freaking day!

I loved the murky waters and the close quartered claustrophobic fears - this is not the open ocean of a shark film. This is not the deep blue sea. This is your dirty, spidery crawl-space... that subterranean darkness that brings you all of life's essentials, water, electricity, internet... and takes away the wasted.

I thought it would be good, but it was much better than I expected. A total immersive ride. Sure, there are some moments where you can nitpick if you so desire. But I had no real desire to do so.

J* gives it 5 stars.

PS. I'm pretty sure this wins the prize for best outro-credit song of the year. They wrap on the big finish, cut to the credits and the whole audience is laughing straight away.