Crawl (2019) -- a review

Kaya Scodelario stars in Crawl as Haley, a college swimmer who’s struggling to maintain her scholarship at a Florida school when she realizes that she had bigger problems. After a swim meet, Haley receives a call from her sister, who hasn’t heard from their father in a while. There’s a major hurricane bearing down on Florida, and the fact that Haley’s father has gone silent--not answering calls or texts--is a bad sign. Despite the fact that she and her dad are not on speaking terms, Haley agrees to make the two hour drive to check in on him.

Taking her four-wheel drive vehicle off road to avoid the safety roadblocks set up by the authorities, Haley drives ever closer to the outer fringes of the hurricane. The winds pick up, the rain falls horizontally, and the old neighborhood of her childhood house is completely abandoned--with the exception of Haley’s dad (Barry Pepper), who’s trapped in the basement of his house under some debris. But as the basement begins to flood from the hurricane, Haley also finds herself dealing with a group of alligators on top of the storm.

Directed by Alexandre Aja, who also directed the marvelously intense High Tension, and the fun 2010 remake of Piranha, Crawl (not to be confused with a similarly-named Australian thriller) is an enjoyably nerve-wracking, edge-of-your-seat horror movie in the same vein as Greg McLean’s Rogue. By wisely making Haley a champion swimmer, Aja gives us a perfect heroine to square off against the alligators--a woman who’s just as nimble and quick in the rapidly rising waters as the alligators. Crawl is a lean, mean 90 minutes of furious tension that just keeps building the moment Haley sets out to find her dad. The sleek story effortlessly propels itself forward, with nary a wasted moment, much like an alligator in the water.

There are some over-the-top encounters with Haley and these predators, but the thoughtful script tempers any silliness with a smart set up and careful foreshadowing. Kaya Scodelario is perfectly cast here; she easily carries the film on her slender shoulders, and through her sturdy acting provides us with a sympathetic character whom we root for from the very first frame. The alligators--which look like a combination of live effects and CGI--are so well done that you only think of them as a real, live threat to Haley. Crawl is anything but a crawl; it’s a fun, fast-paced terror ride through the eye of a hurricane while dodging alligators. Highly recommended. --SF

Comments

Jack Reacher Never Go Back -- a Review

I was first introduced to Jack Reacher through the Tom Cruise movie of the same name that was released back in 2012. I liked the movie well enough, despite a few nitpicks here and there--but I really enjoyed reading the novels by Lee Child. Jack Reacher was a former US Army officer who retires and becomes a drifter, roaming from state to state in the country that he fought so hard to protect. And Reacher is still protecting us, taking on a variety of villains, from backwoods mobsters to big-city terrorists from book to book. The stories in the books are well-told, with great attention paid to the smallest of details. I think of them as 1980s action films, only without being insulting to your intelligence. What a perfect series to adapt to movies, right? Well, Tom Cruise looks nothing like how Jack Reacher is described in the books. And while I thought the first Jack Reacher film was good, the second, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back , is very badly flawed. Based on the JR novel of the sa...

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice -- a review

Despite coming out thirty six years after the first film, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice , once again directed by Tim Burton, wound up being vastly entertaining, adding lots of pleasant surprises, like the use of stop-motion animation. The sequel takes place within the same real-life time frame, with Lydia Deetz, played with wry humor by Winona Ryder, now the host of a ghost hunting show. She’s also the mother of Astrid, a teenager played by Jenna Ortega. They live with Delia Deetz (the always great Catherine O'Hara), Lydia’s step-mother and Astrid’s step-grandmother. After the death of Charles--Delia’s husband and Lydia’s father--during a bird-watching accident involving sharks, the Deetz ladies must go back up to the creepy house in Winter River, Connecticut for his funeral. This is the same place where Lydia first encountered Beetlejuice all those years ago, and she is understandably reluctant to even mention his name, lest she accidentally calls forth Beet...

The Starfury from Babylon 5

Babylon 5 was a science fiction TV series that aired back in the 1990s. It was about a massive space station that was under the command of Earth. It was a fantastic series, and is available on physical media, as well as HBO-Max. In the show, the space station was protected by several wings of space fighters known as Starfuries. They were one of the best-designed, and coolest-looking space fighters to ever launch from a TV series. This is a model kit of the B-5 Starfury that was released by Revell/Monogram in 1/72 scale. But instead of doing the standard Starfury assigned to Babylon 5, I decided to do mine up as a Psi Corps version. The Psi Corps was a telepath group whose fascist ideals threatened B5, as well as Earth itself. The Psi Corps version of the Starfury was black in color, although...

The View From The Mountain

Search This Blog