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.

Comments

Forgotten Film Friday: Absolute Power

Clint Eastwood stars as Luther Whitney, a jewel thief who works in the Washington DC area. One night while he is stealing from a mansion he is forced to hide in a secret compartment with a two way mirror. From there he observes a sexual rezendevous with the wife of a powerful man and the President of the United States Alan Richmond (Gene Hackman) Suddenly the president gets aggressive and while defending herself the woman is shot to death by two Secret Service agents. Luther manages to get away with a letter opener the woman stabbed the president with. At first Luther plans to flee the country. But when he is disgusted by a statement the president makes, Luther decides to expose the crime. I miss these kind of films. The nineties was a great time for thrillers exactly like this. They are not the flashiest films but they are also not obsessed with big action scenes. It's all plot and character with them. Sure this plot might be a little out there but Eastwood makes it work. He's...

John Candy month

What can you say about John Candy? He was a comic genius who was taken from us too soon. There were a lot of comedic heavyweights of the eighties and nineties but Candy stood above most of them. If there is a Mount Rushmore of comedy I imagine John Candy would be on it. For the month of July we are honoring this comic genius.

Oscar bait month

The Academy Awards. That time of the year when everyone debates what movies are truly the best and there is never a consensus and no one is ever happy. A movie can be incredibly popular and then it wins a bunch of Oscars and suddenly it's overrated and not very good or downright bad. It happens every year. But for the month of April let's take a look at those films that had Oscars on their mind and instead fell flat on their faces. Now Oscar Bait is a term that can also be applied to winners or films that did score a bunch of nominations. For example Bradley Cooper's film Maestro is very much an Oscar Bait movie even though it had a decent awards season. I want to talk about the films that did nothing. That were early contenders then either faded away eventually or just plain crashed and burned. Oscar Bait's biggest failures. What wrong here with these? Was the movie poor? Did something else just have a dominant run? Or were politics involved? Maybe all of the above. S...

Cinema Basement

Search This Blog