Creepy Crawlers

It’s all fun and games making jokes about alligators in Florida, until you see footage of an abnormally large one on a golf course or crossing a street, and you remember these are terrifying creatures regardless of how generally harmless most conservationists will tell you they are. Yet the same is true of sharks, but ever since Spielberg made us all afraid to go back in the water, they’ve been the go-to predator for campy schlock thrillers. Alligators haven’t gotten near that attention despite being more intimidating (unlike sharks, they can go on land), with the occasional exception like Lake Placid. And so Crawl, a claustrophobic horror-disaster film directed by Aja Alexandre about man-eating alligators terrorizing a house during an extreme hurricane stands to potentially change that -albeit with a style that’s less Jaws as much as Don’t Breathe by way of Deep Blue Sea.

The set-up is simple but effective. Haley (Kaya Scodelario), a university competition swimmer in northern Florida ignores evacuation orders in expectation of a Category 5 landfall to check on her dad Dave (Barry Pepper) whom she finds injured in the crawl space beneath their home where they are soon cornered by deadly alligators. The film then spends a great deal of time with the two trapped in that space as it gradually floods, while every opportunity to escape arises and is swiftly met with disaster.

The famous moment in Deep Blue Sea where Samuel L. Jackson is suddenly mauled by a shark must have been a template for Alexandre, as it’s the movies’ favourite method of jump scare: an alligator pops up with immediate force and a sharp snapping sound to emphasize its lethality. What keeps these scares from being ineffective though is that Alexandre builds intensity rather well. He’s taken more than a few cues from Spielberg in how his underwater camera will sometimes follow Haley’s feet with uncomfortable closeness, or he’ll frame a scene with a lot of blank space knowing it will tease the audience. He’s well aware that we know every time a character extends a limb there’s every chance a gator is going to snap at it out of nowhere. And the threat is cemented by the fact the movie doesn’t play safe even with just the two core characters, both of whom are injured by the gators multiple times. Despite the inherent redneck sensibility of the premise, which Alexandre really works to subvert, the film has high aspirations for making its gators into movie monsters -it wants to be Jaws (as evidenced by one character going out in the same fashion as Robert Shaw’s Quint). Like Jaws, it plays around with what isn’t seen, using empty water and the occasional long take to enhance suspense, but also wants to show its predators in action as much as possible. Crawl’s gators are large, fast, cunning, ruthless, and difficult to kill. But it’s the semi-realistic circumstance of the flooding basement ticking clock combined with a couple gruesome visual details that keeps the film tense and gripping, as well as prevents it from losing steam and distracts from its most innately ridiculous moments.

There’s a storyline between the big action and suspense beats fixated on the strenuous relationship between Haley and Dave, their family drama, his former coaching habits, and his recent divorce, which is all written about as well as your average Asylum picture. Any writer will tell you these kind of scenes of relief are necessary for an even flow and the film has very good pacing overall, but here they’re pretty bland and lazy, and make the compelling argument that this is a movie more at home on television than in a cinema. In its other respects it doesn’t take itself so seriously; there are a few outlandish kills (including one straight out of Misery), and an undeniably pointless last act bit of plot momentum that ultimately rescinds to its former circumstance. It is darkly funny how much happenstance keeps Haley and Dave from escaping. I’m lightly reminded of Gravity, where the universe seemed to hurl every conceivable astronautic disaster one after the other at Sandra Bullock. The poor protagonists at the centre of Crawl are similarly besieged by every chance of rescue or relief being thwarted by the hungry gators. But the movie strikes a healthy balance between this silliness and some exciting thrills. Maybe that’s the subtle imprint of producer Sam Raimi.

Though it clearly has a bigger budget for its gators and hurricane effects, Crawl feels very much like that Blumhouse kind of horror movie made on a dime but using its cheapness to its advantage. Alexandre is no Jordan Peele or Mike Flannagan, relying ultimately too much on his jump scare effect, too little on bold techniques, and directing his actors in mediocre performances; but he does know how to effectively lock his audience into a confined space and harrowing situation with just enough creativity to repurpose B-movie material into something more interesting.

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JordanBosch
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch

Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch/