IN THEATRES: Crawl

While a Category 5 hurricane rages outside, a young woman attempts to protect her father from a pack of hungry alligators who have taken over their flooded neighbourhood.

Watching Crawl, it felt like I was watching a cinematic rebuttal of last year's The Meg: small-scale where The Meg sprawled; deadly earnest where The Meg coated everything in faux irony; and more brutal in showing the danger its scaly antagonists pose.

Directed by French horror alum Alexandre Aja (High Tension, The Hills Have Eyes remake), Crawl is my kind of genre flick: a simple concept; a claustrophobic location; and most importantly, a willingness to put its main characters through absolute hell.

It is such a perfect example of this kind of small-scale genre filmmaking that - if it were not for the CG gators - I would have thought this was a b-thriller from the 70s or 80s. 

The main characters (played by Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper) are straightforward, and their conflict -resolved in a key moment before the climax - somewhat predictable. But that is part of the fun.

To give the movie some more juice, we get a couple boatloads of minor characters to give the gators a bodycount. 

The creature effects are pretty good - the gore looks mostly practical and Aja keeps the CG monsters in the shadows and under the water, which gives them more weight. 

Setting most of the movie in the house's flooded basement is a brilliant decision that adds to the movie on a couple levels: one, it traps our heroes, two, it gives the movie ticking clock as the flood waters from the storm slowly rise. Finally, it helps to hide the CG monsters with shadows and under the water. If this movie took place in daylight, the effects would look terrible. Aja does not hang the entire affect of his movie on them, and gives the creatures more weight.

If I have one criticism, it's around injuries. Our heroine gets bitten a couple of times, but after the first injury there is little affect to her ability to perform physical tasks. I watched this movie after taking a pretty bad tumble down some concrete stairs and I was walking like an old man for a couple days. I will chalk it up to adrenaline, but it did start feel a little repetitive. 

One thing I did not expect, was how the movie re-wrote a familiar character turn: as somebody who watches a lot of action and disaster movies, one character turn that always turns up is the dad no-one respects who ends up proving to be totally right and accepted by his family at the end. Instead, the big turn here is Dave (Pepper) telling Haley (Scodelario) that his marital split was not her fault, they just don't love each other any more. He even says his wife did nothing wrong and deserves to be happy with her new partner. It is a small moment, but in a movie that is enjoyably cookie cutter, a welcome swerve.

Crawl has not been dealt the best cards at the box office. It will probably become a streaming perennial, but if you - like me - enjoy smaller genre efforts like this, buy a ticket and take your family to see it this weekend (Someone took their baby into the screening I was at, which made for some very interesting commentary).

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on the British girl group the Sugababes, cleverly entitled SugaBros. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!