Mladen and Del review ‘Crawl’
Image courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment.
“Crawl” starring Kaya Scodelario, Barry Pepper, Morfydd Clark. Directed by Alexandre Aja. 127 minutes. R rated.
Mladen’ take
The film “Crawl” is a model of efficiency and efficacy. In the first, oh, 10 minutes, the audience is introduced to the fact that our heroine Haley is a good swimmer who wants to be gooder; that there’s tension in her family; that a powerful hurricane changed course unexpectedly and is heading for South-ish Florida; that first responders will be unable to help if you’re stranded; that Dad isn’t answering calls or texts; and that the family’s dog faces peril. Hell, even the film’s title is efficient because much of the action takes place in a “Crawl” space beneath a home “Crawl”ing with particularly vicious alligators.
“Crawl” has been graded by IMDB viewers as a mediocre horror movie. They’re wrong. This film is an A-, though it misfires here and there. For example, the first couple of gators to attack Dad and Haley hiss, which is OK, and grumble‑moan like they have larynxes. During courtship, bull gators do generate low-frequency sonic vibrations through the water to show-off their manliness to breed and designate territory. But, in “Crawl”, the gator sonics happen in a largely dry, for the moment, “Crawl” space when, I imagine, the gators were thinking about something other than mating. Don’t misunderstand. The gator grumble‑moans were nothing like the shark in “JAWS IV” (or was that “V”?), breaching and then roaring. Still, making the gators make intimidating noise to add menace to the movie was a tad contrived. Also, the film’s depicted family strife is unneeded and the occasional pep talk from Dad for his daughter Haley’s benefit when her tenacity, spirit, resourcefulness, guts, or hope flag amid heavy rainfall, a flooding house, and death‑by‑gator of a childhood friend languorous. And, yes, there’s the questionable decision to leave the house after Haley and Dad finally escape from the reptile‑infested “Crawl” space to reach a boat by wading a couple of hundred feet through murky, hip-high water.
The boat, by the way, was parked at an inundated gas station and convenience store. It was to be used as the escape vehicle by three people who wanted to steal the store’s ATM. Can you guess what happens to the robbers? The fate of the trio is an example of the many times that “Crawl” excels as creature feature horror.
Del will complain about the jump-out-of-your-seat moments in this movie, but I loved the hell out of them. The gator busting through a staircase. The lightning bolt that illuminates a big‑ass meat eater, jaw agape, behind Haley. And, there’s suspense. Lots and lots of suspense. Reaching from a somewhat safe perch across flood water strewn with floating debris that obstructs your view to get your dead friend’s Glock – he was a sheriff’s deputy – for protection. The dog swimming through a long, darkened hallway to reach Dad. All delightful.
“Crawl” also provides a solid dose of gore. Water turning red as gators bite and thrash their human prey. A death roll. A gator gripping Dad near the elbow, snapping his arm in half and then tearing it off. Floating corpses. Wait to you see how Haley dispatches a gator that has taken hold of her. Dad, too, before losing his arm later in the movie, whacks a gator after trapping it in a clever way.
Sit back, if you can, and enjoy “Crawl”. It’s a masterful little film with likeable characters facing cold‑blooded, almost plausible, threats.
Del’s take
“Crawl” is a two-hour and seven-minute wet T-shirt contest, which explains why Mladen likes it so much.
Me? I can take it or leave it. I have nothing against standard-issue potboilers, even if they’re shameless cash grabs, in this case by the studio and a slumming Barry Pepper, who usually chooses more artistically meritorious projects. But schlock is like Hooters chicken wings – to enjoy them one must be in the mood for them, assuming one can focus on the wings and not the breasts. Maybe I wasn’t in the mood for a serving of grease delivered by a perky coed.
As Mladen explained, the protagonist, Haley, travels two hours south of Gainesville to look for her dad as a cat five hurricane approaches. Dad isn’t answering his phone and Haley’s sister up north fears the worst. Haley and Dad are especially close; she’s a college swimmer and he was her coach throughout her youth. But now she’s having doubts after losing a relay, and somehow that means Dad is a monster, or something like that. You know … something conflicty.
As she treks to the AWOL Dad’s seaside abode she passes a flooded alligator farm. These are the Special Super Intelligent Mind-Reading Alligators from Mars or something based on what happens later in the movie. She finds Dad in the crawl space beneath his house, clawed to damn near bloody ruin by … well, OK. I should let you watch the movie to find out, but, Psssttt! It crawls.
What follows is a string of predictable pitfalls, emotional ups and downs and cliché after soggy, growly cliché. I will give “Crawl” credit – in most of these movies the protagonist is a crack shot who always dodges the falling asteroid and ambles into the sunset with the girl – or boy – slung over his or her shoulder. In “Crawl,” no such immunity is granted, and since it’s a father and daughter there will be no ambling into the sunset. Well, maybe an AARP lecture or two.
No, Mladen, I didn’t object to the jump scares. What I did object to was the stupidity – like helicopters flying in a cat five hurricane. Like people strolling the flooded streets in a cat five hurricane. Like a one-armed guy able to bludgeon his way through a roof with his bare hand.
If you go into “Crawl” with sufficiently low expectations you’ll enjoy it, because it’s a decently entertaining movie with not bad special effects. But that’s all we’re talking here – entertainment. Not art.
I give it between a B- and a C+. Make it a B- because the hurricane actually looked somewhat realistic (although heads up, moviemakers: We just had a cat five here in the Panhandle and there’s tons of footage on YouTube if you’d care to educate yourself about what a storm like that looks like).
Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and author.
Image courtesy of Florida Memory.
This is the Fourth of July I remember.
It is the sepia-toned America of my youth – large cars with tailfins, puffy thunderstorms over Crestview and foil peeled off a Salisbury steak TV dinner. Television stations start their morning broadcast with a noisy rendition of the national anthem.
It is sidewalks and bicycles with fenders and clown-like horns with big, rubbery bulbs. Mom throws us out of the house in the morning and tells us to go play, so we wander the neighborhood, looking for our friends, drinking out of outdoor spigots when we get thirsty and working on our sunburns that will be sponged with vinegar that night.
It’s riding our bicycles into the billowing white cloud behind the mosquito sprayer and peeking through the front window at a green TV screen, because the next-door neighbor is the only person on our street with a color TV and we think it’s amazing.
Or standing on the weedy shores of Cinco Bayou at the foot of Cinco Bridge as water skiers jump over ramps and carry beautiful girls on their shoulders, and if you wait until dusk some guys of questionable sobriety will show up in a boat and launch fireworks they brought back from Alabama.
It’s beauty contests on the beach and cooking burgers on the nasty grills at Wayside Park on the island and marveling over the giant shark hanging tail-first from the fishing pier with its guts spilling out while people pose for photos.
You can buy an alligator at a tourist trap for a dollar, a real alligator, and Tower Beach serves the best burgers on the planet – buns heated on the cooktop and smeared with grease, exactly the way they should be – and the PA system thunders “I can’t get no satisfaction” while girls with lacquered hair and guys with slicked-back Vitalis curls gyrate to unfathomable rhythms.
And then at night it’s standing in the driveway with a Tasco reflector and gazing at the moon or a wobbly image of Mars or pale Saturn with its strange rings. You have to smear Off cream on your arms and legs because despite the fogger that left the neighborhood smelling like a chemical factory, the mosquitoes are tougher than a little DDT and they’ll eat you alive.
This is the July Fourth I remember.
The best July Fourth ever.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, Ello and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .