A movie like Crawl can go one of two ways: The filmmakers can take it seriously from beginning to end and try to make the most suspenseful alligator-attack-in-a-flooded-crawlspace-during-a-hurricane movie ever, or they can acknowledge the absurdity of this effort with winks to the audience and moments of humor.
Alligators may have two sets of eyelids, but there’s no winking in Crawl. The film is fully committed to its own skewed realism, and humor is washed away with the torrents of rain. You have to respect horror B-movie producer-director Alexandre Aja’s devotion to his material.
The premise is simple: Haley (Kaya Scodelario), a competitive college swimmer, drives into a hurricane to locate her father, Dave (Barry Pepper). She finds him, unconscious, in the dirt- and pipe-filled space beneath the first floor of their otherwise deserted family home next to a waterway. Along with at least two alligators.
Can Haley’s ingenuity and swimming skills save the day? Not without a lot of suffering along the way. Haley and Dave can’t fully avoid all those claws and teeth. And several other folks wander into the gators’ vicinity, at least one of whom is torn limb from limb on camera. But Crawl doesn’t belabor its thin narrative — it’s just 80 minutes or so before the credits roll.
Scene by scene, the suspense is well maintained. There’s just enough blood and guts to secure an R rating but not so much as to seem gratuitous. Scodelario (from the Maze Runner movies) does a respectable job, and the combination of animatronics and CG effects create some credible gators. There’s still no reason for this movie’s existence, really, except a shameless attempt to wring some cash out of audiences who have supported other recent woman-versus-big-teeth movies like The Shallows and 47 Meters Down.
Oh, and there is one wink in Crawl: The end credits feature Bill Haley & His Comets’ “See You Later, Alligator.” Worth a smile, or an eye roll.
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