Forgotten Film Friday (on a Saturday): Crawl

A retrospective by Brooks Rich

Two of my favorites genres are pissed off nature and pissed off animals. Whether it's a giant storm or volcano laying siege to a town, or some apex predator picking off the human cast, I love a good natural disaster or real life creature feature. Crawl from 2019 successfully combines both genres for a brutal and quick ride.

Haley, played by Kaya Scodelario, braves a Category 5 hurricane bearing down on Florida to look for her estranged father Dave, played by the awesome Barry Pepper, who is not answering any calls. Haley finds an unconscious Dave down in the crawl space of the old family house. She and Dave are attacked by alligators, who got in through an open storm drain. Now with the storm intensifying and the water rising, the two must fight the large prehistoric monsters and try to escape either a watery grave or a brutal death in the jaws of the great beasts.

This film is intense. Director Alexandre Aja, known for films like High Tension and the surprisingly excellent Hills Have Eyes remake, does a good job balancing the two main threats, the storm and the alligators. The storm is an ever present menace and when the alligators they immediately are terrifying and aggressive. The majority of the movie is spent down in the crawl space with the gators and it is intense. Any good pissed off animal movie needs good kills and Crawl delivers this in spades. These gators aren't messing around.

This film is actually what you think it's going to be. We're not talking art house cinema here. This is just a good time, an old school tense Hollywood monster/disaster movie. Check it out.

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