Move over, Jaws clones—Crawl is here to claim the summer movie season for the reptiles
Film Reviews Movie Review
Fifty years after Steven Spielberg made a whole nation afraid to go in the water, sharks still prowl the summer movie season. This is, in fact, the fourth consecutive year that a descendent of Jaws will descend upon multiplexes during the warmest season—next month brings the gnashing teeth and ominous fins of a 47 Meters Down sequel. But flesh-eating fish don’t have a monopoly on the aquatic horror business. Crawl, which shimmies ravenously into theaters today, invites a less represented but arguably just as deadly predator to the summer feeding frenzy: the mighty alligator, cold-blooded killing machine of the bayou and the scourge of riverboat gamblers everywhere. If the log-like reptilian menace doesn’t gnaw on the public’s nerves as consistently as the shark does, this no-frills, claustrophobic creature feature suggests that maybe it should. After all, it’s not like a Great White can follow you onto dry land.
Granted, there are only so many places a foolish skinny-dipper might slip into the maw of a fortunate gator, which is why Crawl is set in Florida, a natural habitat of this real-life monster. As its title teases, most of the movie takes place in a crawlspace, the bottom level of a Sunshine State house rocked by adverse weather. Trapped in this treacherously cramped basement is a college swim champ, Haley (Kaya Scodelario), who’s come to find her recently divorced father, Dave (Barry Pepper), unconscious and injured in the depths of the property. The culprits: hungry, oversized alligators, slinking around in the darkness. They’re not all this besieged family unit has to worry about. A Category 5 hurricane is bearing down hard on the area, slowly flooding the house and blocking escape routes. If the gators don’t kill the two, the rising water level just might.
The director, Alexandre Aja, has found danger in the drink before. A decade ago, he knocked out an outrageously gory 3D remake of Joe Dante’s Piranha, putting a bunch of nubile spring-breakers on the menu. Crawl doesn’t skimp on the carnage—those rows of snapping teeth do their bloody damage to vulnerable appendages. But this is no jokey splatterfest. Aja, a French merchant of grue who rarely repeats himself, has made a slender survival thriller instead. The bare-bones plot unfolds as a series of nerve-shredding objectives: get to the phone, grab the radio, open the hatch, reach the boat. Space, queasily limited within the single setting, becomes an X factor in the human-versus-nature struggle; Haley and Dave might be perilously stuck in a perpetual crouch, but they’re also sometimes saved by the close quarters, by their ability to scramble through tight spots and bend in a way their scaly adversaries can’t.
Produced by Evil Dead honcho Sam Raimi, Crawl is dumb genre fun, but it’s not too dumb. The gators, convincingly summoned from the digital gene pool, are perhaps cunning even by the standards of this sneak-attack species—they know just when to hold their hisses and growls for a well-timed jump scare. But they’re not too big or too unstoppable or too intelligent; you wouldn’t confuse them for escapees from the Deep Blue Sea laboratory. The humans, meanwhile, don’t make blatantly stupid decisions just to move the plot along or thrust themselves into further danger. They do walk off an awful lot of serious injury, even managing to hold up their respective ends of conversations while holding their gaping wounds/stumps. (Those hoping for some gnarly kills will be relieved to hear that Crawl supplies plenty of expendable supporting characters, including some unlucky rescue workers and a trio of thieves ransacking a flooded gas station across the street—a set piece that allows Aja to play with distance and background action in devious ways.)
But about those conversations. If any one thing holds back this modest, skillfully made potboiler from true B-movie glory, it’s the human drama. The script, by brothers Michael and Shawn Rasumssen (The Ward), presents Haley and Dave’s battle against the elements as a therapeutic ordeal, endured in the symbolically subterranean space of the old family house. Will the two escape not just the hungry gators but also the resentment that’s forced a wedge between them over the years? Will dad’s tough-love encouragement, doled out in flashbacks to the days when he was still Haley’s swimming coach, come in handy during the experience? It’s pure formulaic pap, but then, so were the emotional motivations of The Shallows and The Meg. Shark or gator, no leviathan can compete with the deadliness of a tortured family backstory.
114 Comments
Gator Monthly…The Magazine for Alligators by Alligators givesgives the movie a NOM-NOM-NOM-NOM. That 4 NOMs out of a possible 5!!
What’s hilarious is that a person in the water who sees a four-foot shark that wants no part of anything bigger than a 6″ fish will scream and race for the shore. Meanwhile I’ve seen people standing on sloped banks taking pictures of eight-foot alligators that are a LOT faster than they are. Granted if you play golf in SC or FL you do kind of start to ignore them.
I live in an area where the only way you’ll ever see an actual, live gator is a zoo, aquarium, or idiot with a real bad idea for a pet.The number of people I know who’ve been deluded by years of Animal Planet into thinking they are master croc handlers… let’s just say parking would be a lot easier if they were given the chance.
I was under the impression that gators are not only not particularly fast out of water but they also won’t really chase. They have that initial lunge then just kinda give up.
They’ll gladly give you a different impression, and keep going past that too
They don’t really hunt away from water, so yes you are safer away from–even a short jog away from–rather than in or right beside the water. The first part though, about them not being particularly fast out of the water? That’s what the gators want you to think. They’re faster than you. If you’re safe, it’s not because they can’t catch you, it’s because if they’re out of the water like that they’re not hunting.
This is one of those myths that’s embraced by people who live around gators and crocs because it makes them sound like brave badasses.The land speed record for a crocodile is 11 mph, slow enough for any moderately fit person to outrun, and that’s the record. They aren’t sustaining anything like that speed for very long either. What you need to worry about is their ability to quickly lunge out of the water for about their body length. Past that though, the reason these animals aren’t trying to chase things out of water is because they’d be bad at it. They certainly would hunt on land (as adults) if they could, but that’s not what they’re adapted for. And in general the bigger the individual croc or gator, the less efficient it’s going to be out of the water.
You’re right, I was too focused on the numbers and my brain glossed over the fact that the 30mph I was looking at was referring to that lunge speed, not an actual running speed. Still, considering that a big gator can be 15 feet or so, that’s a pretty good swath they can cover with just that lunge.
The land speed record for a crocodile is 11 mph, slow enough for any moderately fit person to outrun, and that’s the record. They aren’t sustaining anything like that speed for very long either. And we’re talking about Florida residents are their potential dinner. 11 mph is just fine for that.
I got chased by a gator in SC when I was a kid, we lived on a lake. The standing wisdom I always heard was to make sharp turns if you have to run from a gator because they can only move in fairly straight lines on land due to the limitations of their limbs, but man……they can do pretty well to chase you in that straight line
You might want to read up before you visit a swamp.
I was under the impression that gators are not only not particularly fast out of waterThat’s what the sneaky bastards want you to think. They have three modes of land-based locomotion; the belly crawl, the high walk and the gallop.Turns out they can sprint pretty fast on land. Check out this video from National Geographic for a freaky visual…
There is a lot of misinformation in this thread.That video is of a young freshwater crocodile, which are fairly rare in the US. I live in the heart of gator country (South Florida) and have never seen a Croc in 37 years. Gators and Crocs are can be distinguished by their snout. Gators at the surface of the water usually have their entire snout exposed and it is very fat and round. Crocs at the surface have a thin snout and only their eyes and nostrils are above the waterline.
Alligators hunt by stealth, typically slowly moving in with their eyes and snout above the water line and they DO NOT create any wake as they move forward slowly. They kill mammals by drowning them, not with their bite. Obviously they could kill if they hit a major artery, but that is not what they’re adapted for, their teeth are meant to grip, and their powerful tails allow them to spin in the water, disorientating their prey as they drag them underwater.This is why you have to keep pets away from the banks of bodies of water. The gators know where there are pets and will patiently wait for them to go right up on the edge, then BAM!On land, unless you are within the animal’s body length, it is unlikely that it can cover enough ground to catch you. Humans are adapted for land travel and gators are not. I’ve never seen a Gator run more than a few feet out of the water while chasing a fish on the end of a line up the bank.
The bigger the gator on the land, the slower it will be, too much un-buoyed weight.I’ve been teaching my daughter since she could walk to not go near the water line unless she is with an adult, that there are ALWAYS going to be gators in any lake or canal. Strangely, I never had anyone teach me this as a kid and I used to occasionally swim across canals.
Alligators are incredibly fast in or out of water, and can certainly outrun a normal human if the motivation strikes them. However you are correct that they’re ambush (read: lazy) predators.It is rare for an alligator to attack, let alone kill/eat, a human on dry land unless they’re down at the water’s edge.
I think it’s mostly that their fast in a straight line. Those little legs don’t make for great cornering. And I think they’re pretty lazy as well so they’re not going to chase you down the street or anything.
You gotta run in a zigzag. That’s the only thing I remember from the reptile guy who came to our grade school. I might have just saved your life, Shockrates.
Your average booj cracker in FL thinks alligators are too slow to catch them on land even if they’re within an alligator-length of the alligator, because they don’t know the most basic shit about things in their own state that might kill them, animals, weather, whatever. It’s one of those things that doesn’t change about that place
Florida, man.
As a transplant here I’m gonna politely say, you are mistaken. If you do a little research, you will see gators rarely chase humans (or any animal) on land. Please just look it up. Also, most people in Florida are well aware of what gators are capable of and are avid outdoors people. Many people will go kayaking with pistols just to be safe from gators. Also, if gators show signs that they are no longer afraid of humans, they are usually reported and may be killed. This is probably one of the few states that i know of where animals that can kill you are all around you. Not something to be proud of for sure, but you kinda have to learn a little bit about them before venturing out. Since moving here, I have spoken and researched all the various types of dangerous animal behaviors. I’ve spoken to many people about it as well. Thing is, like shitty subway smells or street noise, you kinda get used to it and can almost forget what’s there.
Asa kid in Tampa, I remember visiting my Aunt’s condo that had a lot of part-time residents and time share vacationers.There was a a little steam out back to a docjr over it, and there were idiots fishing for brim and then tossing them to a gator.I’ve always wondered how many pets that nicely domesticated gator ended up eating.
A friend’s family has a place in SC near Charleston, and the gators there eat pets at a constant rate. You don’t let your dog out unsupervised.
I visited the Everglades a few years ago and couldn’t believe how many gators there were. They were lying across walking paths and people just stepped around them like it was no big deal. They seem pretty docile. I’m from Australia – if you saw a saltwater crocodile here you would not go within 50 meters of it, even on land!
I live 50 miles from Yellowstone. We have a “Gore board” where we keep a tally of tourists who get a foot away from a bison bull to take a selfie, not realizing they hate people and can run 35 mph. And don’t get me started on the bears.
The only thing I find more gruesomely amusing is the increasing number of people falling off the rim of the Grand Canyon, typically while taking selfies.
Early review on RT gave this an F. Someone named S. Archer.
Unlike The Lion King, this is a nature documentary I can get behind.
Unlike the Lion King, this is also an animal movie DOWD can get behind. By 2 letter grades ….
Really been enjoying the viral marketing this movie’s been doing in the Chicago-area. Releasing a 4-foot gator in a Humboldt Park? Brilliant!
If only someone had thought to acquire a Chance the Rapper number at the last minute for the soundtrack release ….
I just can’t get scared by alligator/crocodile movies. they’re so specifically suited to their specific niche (ambush predator) that they might as well be aliens when they show them moving on land or being these super maneuverable water attackers. its so goofy
Every time I see Kaya Scodelario in something my hope is renewed that she’ll finally get the huge career that she’s well overdue for.
It’s kind of wild that she’s missed the “English rose” boat thus far. There are only so many British brunettes who can get their shot before she does, I reckon.
Well she’s been in at least one blockbuster. Unfortunately it was one of those dreadful Pirate films, long after even the hardcore fans had given up.I must admit, Florence Pugh’s (not unjustified) ascent has seen her skip the queue, somewhat.Anyway, I’m a big Scodelario fan, I’m sure she’ll get her shot.
I live in Baton Rouge, just a few blocks from the Mississippi River, and we’re about to have a massive storm that will almost certainly cause serious flooding… right as this fuckin’ thing comes out.
If y’all don’t hear from me, the gators got me.
I live in New Orleans, and I just asked my wife if she wants to break the “shelter in place” order to go see it. She does not.
I definitely don’t blame her.
Seriously, Dowd is just screwing with us now, right?
CGI Lions got the D+ and the alligator gets the B- …..
The Bey Hive is going to come from Dowd’s head and then feed it to Chance the Snapper off the room of the AVC offices.
I’ve actually heard Beyonce fans admit she’s not so good at acting. Mind you these were somewhat reasonable people, the hive is probably beyond reason.
Because they are the same things, obviously.
What
44 years is close enough to consider it 50? I could under stand 48 or even 47, but saying Jaws was 50 years ago is a stretch.
Are you by chance 44 years old? “I’m not close to 50 damnit!”
42 (or 48 in Dowd-years.)
That’s a C+ age.
Well, he was 44 but the City computer altered his life clock so that everyone would think he was a runner…
Yeah I’ll be 42 this year. If 75 was 50, I’d be pushing that number myself. Don’t age me so much, Dowd!
I’m 42 now, it’s… not the worst.
I hope not; it’s the answer to life, the universe and everything.
Alls I know is that it was truly inspiring to see the D-Day centennial earlier this summer.
It’s fine, LOL
Yeah, I’m 49, and technically saw Jaws at a drive in with my parents and older siblings at age 5, but to be honest, I don’t remember.
“Half a century” probably would’ve been the better wording.Rounding 44 to 50 is roughly as accurate as referring to 9 years as a decade.
Heck with that. I’ll be 49 for another month and a half and I ain’t rounding up anything.
Whenever I see the trailer for this, all I can think of is, “See, that’s why we didn’t have basements in Florida.”
I feel like I keep harping on this. One of my favorite restaurants has a basement performance area, but otherwise? Even those bits that are really Georgia or Alabama don’t. I see from the trailer it’s more a glorified ‘crawl’space LOL wink, wink, but hmmm.
this sounds good! also, i work with an elderly woman who lives here on cape cod in a condo complex who sees hallucinations. a few months ago, she “saw” an alligator on her back deck. she keeps wanting to warn the landscapers & people with children. when i tell her it probably died during the winter, she says, “you never know.” that’s pretty much her usual response to something she doesn’t want to admit to. in conclusion: old people are fun!
I concur. From personal interactions I’ve also noticed that “you never know” is the default rejoinder of old people whose logic is questioned.
“you never know” is the old person’s “whatever.”
There’s also “We’ll see.”
Might want to give Momma Murphy’s visions some consideration. We’ve started seeing alligators in Norther Arkansas in the past few years and it is an area that experiences freezing or below freezing temps every winter. Alligators are evolving.
This sounds solid. Also it makes me very happy that this received a B- and the weird creepy looking Lion King got a D+. There was some user in that comment section wondering “who does Dowd review for”, and complaining about his system. Giving an unnecessary Disney remake that looks to drain out the majesty of the original a D+ makes sense, giving a schlocky creature feature a B, also makes sense. Dowd, your system checks out to me.
Dowd reviews for The People, friend. Never forget that.
“Granted, there are only so many places a foolish skinny-dipper might slip into the maw of a fortunate gator”I assume Humboldt Park is now on that list.
That story warms my heart. You hear about the gentrification of Humboldt Park, and then you hear “someone released their pet gator into the lagoon.” Ain’t gentrified yet.
I laughed at this as a person that has lived in Florida a long time. Is Dowd unfamiliar with Florida Man/Woman? Our standard joke to newcomers is if its water assume there’s a gator in it, yes. Even puddles especially during rainy season.
The problem with the tortured family backstory in these types of films is it misses the lightness of touch that Jaws had. That final line “I used to hate the water. I can’t imagine why.” doesn’t neatly sum up Brody coming to terms with past trauma, but it does show him coming into his own having been heroic. So often with these the monster is a literal stand-in for some obvious traumatic event that it comes off as very pat and easy.
It guarantees a bunch of free publicity from certain middle-brow corners if instead of making a scary movie with the money you scrape together, you just build a maudlin, clumsy story about some life event that fucks people up in the head, perch a monster or ghost or whatever against one side of it like a lean-to, then stand back and sort of wave people towards it with a boater hat and cane. Draw Your Own Conclusions, Ten Bucks Each, Not For The Faint Of Heart & Veterans Discount
There’s also no real exploration of what makes Brody hate the water so much at the beginning. It’s just alluded that there was some early trauma and that’s that.
In a screenwriting class, that would probably be a big no-no, but the movie just keeps moving so relentlessly (kind of like its titular character), that it breezes some of those classic story “issues”.
By your tone I’d imagine you’d agree, but I’m not even sure I’d consider it an “issue”. I’m scared of the water myself (I can and do swim, I just don’t like open water) and there’s no deep meaningful reason for it. On the other hand, if I was in a situation where I overcame that, it would be meaningful in its own right. But I think Jaws is pretty much perfect so grain of salt.
One of the true joys of watching a great movie is seeing how many “rules” it breaks. Jaws and the early Indiana Jones movies are fine examples – movies littered with unexplained personality tics and irredeemable character flaws that never try to explain or redeem them, instead expecting the audience to just go with the flow. Occasionally a movie like Back to the Future comes along, where the nonstop setups and callbacks actually work, but more often you get trite, clumsy freshadowing and pseudopsychological nonsense.
Even the book never explained hating the water. But my GOD it ramped up the town angst, the mob, and Brody’s hatred of the idle rich for banging his wife up to 11. JAWS and The Godfather were both far better movies than books for losing the ridiculous tortured back stories and side plots.
It’s good to see Aja still in the game, and that’s great that he’s saluting nature-run-amok! horror from the 70s/80s, however, something that’s not his fault either: this movie suffers from a seemingly very modern problem: the trailer shows so much that there’s really the sense that it basically shows the movie, likely discouraging people from going to see it.
I’ve definitely seen old-timey trailers that do the same thing. Like it was not uncommon for old monster movie trailers to show footage from the very end of the movie.
They’ve done studies that show that trailers that spoil more are more effective at attracting audience interest.
First time I saw the trailer for Cast Away I was astonished it showed the ending. Decided right then not to buy a ticket.
Since they supposedly kill more people than crocodiles, I hope someday we get a hippo horror movie. They’re hungry! Hungry!
I remember some nature documentary about hippos had a segment where some scientists crushed a watermelon in a hydraulic press to see how much force it took— it was some really high number or other. Then they gave a watermelon— an entire watermelon, this is— to a hippo, which bit through it like it was you or I eating a potato chip. In a way it was sort of terrifying.
There’s actually something called “the watermelon challenge” in which people crush watermelons with merely their limbs (typically the thighs).
There’s a fantastic book series about that very thing.
It is unforgivable that Kinja put your divine comment in the gray, obscuring that book cover.
Hippos are no joke.
He clearly got that thing I sent him…
Yeah but did he get that thing he sent him?
Such a fantastic name, and great ads. One of those phrases that runs through my head at the merest suggestion.Like, whenever my wife uses her company’s jargon for work superstars — “high-po’s”* — I always think “Oh, it’s ‘cause they’re hungry. Hungry!!!”*High-potential employees
Oh, even worse? We’ve directly started using hippos as a term in product management. It basically means when you’re trying to prioritize requests, the hippo usually gets what they want, even if it’s the least valuable or improving. Hippo is ‘highest paid person on’ not a dead on acronym, but works on a few levels.
LOL
Hipnado!
Or the two words could converge around the letter ‘t’ as in “hippopotornado”.
This is one of those movies where I liked the trailer I saw, but it didn’t make me want to see the movie. It was just a decent trailer. Maybe someday though, good story
It’s pirateable.
Hey… good idea
I had no idea that gators had it in for riverboat gamblers. Those concealed derringers must be practically useless!
“After all, it’s not like a Great White can follow you onto dry land”Sharkansas Women’s Prison Massacre’s prehistoric sharks would like to have a bite with you
It was a tragedy that the title was the best thing about that movie. And I’m a Wynorski fan.
44 is not 50. Math is math for a reason.
It’s called “artistic rounding”, pedant.
Is it weird that my biggest issue with this movie is that American Dad did the same premise with a shark a few years ago?
Dowd gives this a B-? I’m sold. That’s essentially a Janet Maslin B+.
I was wondering why this hadn’t been reviewed yet.I give it a B not a B-. Lots of jump scares, good gator effects and attacks. Worth going to see.
Are we seriously comparing this to one of the greatest movies of all time?
In that top image, Scodelario looks like Jessica Biel, which is fine, since Biel’s an anti-vaxxer now, so we could use a replacement.
This is why I love Greg McLean’s 2007 movie : no emotional backstory, just survival. Also, while there is definitely a too-giant crocodile, it mostly just acts like an aggressive croc defending its territory. It leaves the characters alone for long stretches because it only sees them as a threat when they enter its realm (which they have to cross to reach safety).So Rogue has a croc and Crawl has alligators. We need a movie about giant killer Caimans now.
Kaya Scodolerio is one fine-ass chick.
Barry Pepper is a national treasure. He’s the guy you call when Alex Winter can’t get time off from his job at the car wash.
“Merchant of grue?” Did Aja make a Zork movie I missed?
We have our own alligator here in Chicago, Chance the Snapper.
Is this blast of girl power meant to counter in anyway justifiable questions about Aja’s sexism given the exploitation roots of Piranha (one severed dick aside) and how willfully fucked up Maniac was? Because I’m kind of thinking this is a case where he needs to make the effort. People who want to have their women-scalping and empowerment too are about as convincing as Tarantino tut-tutting violence.
I am sick of all of these motherfucking gators in this motherfucking crawlspace!
Thanks for this review, I went to see Crawl tonight because of it! I’d never heard of it, the synopsis made me thinking “…hmmf, is it a joke movie?” I read your review, and took away from it: I’d probably have fun. And even if it’s stupid it sounds like I won’t be pissed mad at how stupid it is. Fun.
So one of my favorite things happened. I went to the movie to have fun — and ended up having a BLAST! You undersold this flick in the best possible way! This is intended as a compliment.
I got to meet and have dinner with the screenwriters last night. (They live in the Boston area.) They described Crawl as less a horror movie and more a home invasion movie with alligators.
Ok, I’ve lived here a long time, and I know there are basements in Florida, but they certainly aren’t as common as they were in upstate NY. So I’m wondering why, based on this article a major metaphorical plot point has to do with a basement? I get it, symbolism, claustrophobia etc, director is European, it was shot in Serbia… as much as my kitsch loving Florida ass wants to see this, the basement might be weird.
It’s a crawlspace, not a basement. Granted, they made it like a 4.5′ crawlspace instead of the standard 3′.
I know they keep calling it a crawlspace… but yeah. I’m just nitpicking, I still want to see it!
A.A. Dowd, are you on the take? Is there pressure to paint this lame thing rosy?Killer animal movies can be great, but this one is a total trash waste of time. The Humans move as slow as molasses, the alligator design is ridiculous, and what the heck is a helicopter rescue attempt doing in a category 5 hurricane?I like dumb, but there are limits, and the few thrill kills lack any suspense. If the alligators are going to hunt BY SPLASH in a category 5 hurricane can we at least have them fly through the air or something?It seems obvious, and if you’re inclined to see movies named Crawl you’re probably asking for it anyways, but still…. What a waste of a Friday night.