The Facts:

Synopsis: While attempting to save her father during a hurricane, a young woman finds herself trapped in a flooding house and must fight for her life against alligators.

Stars: Kaya Scodelario, Barry Pepper, Ross Anderson, Anson Boon, Morfydd Clark

Director: Alexandre Aja

Rated: R

Running Length: 87 minutes

Trailer Review: Here

TMMM Score: (8.5/10)

Review: If there’s one thing that will give me the honest-to-goodness willies, it’s an alligator. I don’t care if they are on TV pestering golfers just trying to play through, lounging on the side of the highway on the Florida interstate, or six feet away behind glass in a zoo. I do not like them. I can vividly remember my father making the mistake of renting the VHS of the 1980 classic creature feature Alligator (where oh where is the remastered BluRay of that gem?) which kept me out of swimming pools for months. While other creepy monsters of the deep have had their fair share of D-grade movies, somehow the alligator and its fellow archosaur, the crocodile, have had a better run of decent films than most. Aside from Alligator, there’s Rogue, Lake Placid, Black Water, and Primeval. Heck, even the Arnold Schwarzenegger actioner Eraser has a memorable crocodile encounter.

So you can understand my excitement and a little bit of fear when I heard that Crawl was making its way into theaters. The logline alone, girl is trapped inside flooding house with alligators during a hurricane, was enough to entice even the most exasperated horror junkie, burned too often by SyFy originals and direct to Redbox gunk featuring killer piranhas and beastly barracudas. I kept tabs on the movie during its production and while a trailer seemed to give away key moments, I held out hope it was a return to the kind of fun monster movie we used to get served up regularly by movie studios.

It’s usually never a good sign when a major movie studio like Paramount decides not to screen their film for critics in advance and that’s what happened with Crawl. While it often can hold off negative press for a stinker (like the recent garbage remake of Child’s Play) it can also stymie a film that might be better than its genre suggests. Opening the film the week after Spider-Man: Far From Home and before The Lion King roars into theaters, there was a small gap in July when there was no competition and that’s where Paramount opted to release the film without much fanfare.

What a huge mistake.

Paramount, who often screens gigantic duds without a care in the world, kept the downright tasty Crawl under wraps and away from the eyes of critics for no good reason and that’s only to their detriment. A very fine creature feature produced on a low budget that feels like a high-end affair, it’s short and scary and delivers in every way a movie like this should. All the beats are hit, all the bites are taken. This is the movie jolt this sleepy summer has needed and it’s come from the least expected place.

Hurricane Wendy is coming on strong along the Florida coast and college co-ed Haley (Kaya Scodelario, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales) can’t reach her father Dave (Barry Pepper, Monster Trucks) who lives near the eye of the storm. Against the advice of her sister (Morfydd Clark, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) and local law enforcement, Haley makes her way through rough weather to the beach house to make sure her father is OK. Finding the house abandoned, upon further investigation she finds her father in the muddy subbasement with a nasty injury. However, before she’s able to get him out and avoid being stranded in the storm her exit is cut-off by a gigantic alligator that has found its way into the basement through an overflow pipe…and it’s not about to let its dinner just walk away.

So begins a fight for survival as Haley and Dave fend off the rising waters in their flooding house while evading an ever-growing number of alligators that begin to swarm around their neighborhood. Screenwriters Michael and Shawn Rasmussen devise some fairly ingenious ways of keeping the father and daughter believably stranded in the basement while also credibly showing their attempts at escape. In so many of these movies the characters suddenly lose all brain cells (if they had any to begin with) once they are put into a predicament but here both call upon their own convenient strengths to get them out of this ‘gator jam.

In the past, director Alexandre Aja hasn’t been the most subtle of horror directors. Beginning with the stomach-churning Haute Tension in 2003 and following it up with gross-outs like Mirrors and remakes of The Hills Have Eyes, Maniac, and the blood frenzy of Piranha 3D, he doesn’t exactly do soft horror so I was worried Crawl would be an unnecessary gore fest. Surprisingly, Aja is the most restrained he’s been ever, nicely dialing back the carnage and reserving it for when its most effective. Keeping it contained like that makes the moments when the alligators do strike have a far greater impact. The attacks, on poor souls that find themselves in close proximity to Haley and her father, are vicious and not unnecessarily prolonged.

I’d love to see some a behind the scenes making of documentary on Crawl to see how they utilized their sets and incorporated those with green screen because it’s a nearly seamless blend. Filmed in Serbia (yeah, Serbia), the movie largely takes place on that one labyrinthine basement set but does frequently switch to the rising waters outside where the alligators lurk and can swim freely. The gators themselves are an impressive mix of CGI and animatronic creations, far better than they should be considering the budget. Put it this way, I was in a movie seat that reclined and 98% of the time the alligators looked real enough to make me raise my legs up even higher.

Shortly after seeing Crawl I was speaking to someone about how much the movie frightened me and they asked me why this scared me so much when I routinely watch movies like The Conjuring, The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Alien, Annabelle Comes Home, etc. Well, there’s a huge difference between those and Crawl. Crawl is a movie, like Jaws, that feels like it could maybe possible sometime somehow happen. And it’s why I’ll never live in Florida. Or by a beach. Or go into a basement. You, however, should make your way to your local theater and catch this one…if only to support these kinds of films and encourage studios like Paramount to make more of the same quality.