Movie Review
Crawlers
5/10
TLDR
Crawlers locks a rundown apartment building down with a million venomous spiders and trades old-school monster fun for ooey-gooey gross-outs. Matilda Lutz and a scene-stealing dominatrix keep it crawling, but even at 75 minutes, it overstays its welcome.
Where to watch: In theaters October 16 (Roadside Attractions and Saban Films)
The Facts
Synopsis: A catastrophic infestation of venomous and deadly spiders sends an apartment building into lockdown. Trapped inside by a police-mandated quarantine, building manager Serena and her residents battle to survive as the creatures multiply by the second. Armed with her intimate knowledge of the complex, Serena may be the only one who can keep them alive, if she can confront her deepest fear.
Director: Ángel Gómez Hernández
Stars: Matilda Lutz, Gregg Sulkin, William Miller, Melina Matthews
Rated: R, for violent content/bloody images, language and brief sexual material
Running Length: 81 minutes
The Thoughts
Here’s a little bedtime story, courtesy of the title cards that open Crawlers. There are so many spiders on this planet that if they ever decided to eat us, we’d all be gone within a year. Sweet dreams! It’s a cheeky welcome mat, and it tells you right away that director Ángel Gómez Hernández isn’t taking his creature feature too seriously. The trouble is, the movie never quite figures out how seriously it wants us to take it, either.
Spiders are having a moment. Sting and the terrific Infested both turned apartment buildings into giant webs in 2024, and here comes number three. You’d have to go back to the mid-1970s to find a run like it. In 1975, The Giant Spider Invasion dressed a Volkswagen Beetle in fur and legs and called it a monster. Two years later, William Shatner battled an army of tarantulas in Kingdom of the Spiders. The TV movie Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo followed, with a few more stowing away in a planeload of coffee beans.
Gone is the simple, old-fashioned fun of Arachnophobia, which is still a delight 36 years later. In its place, Crawlers serves up ooey-gooey gross-outs in an effective but repetitive squirmer. Even at barely 75 minutes before the credits roll, it feels long.
Crawlers Checks Into the Paradiso Palms
Meet George (Chris Rogers, The Running Man), a spider expert just back from a research trip abroad. He’s brought home a souvenir, and it isn’t in his suitcase. That angry boil on his back? It’s a nest of spider eggs. To make a graphic scene short, they live, he doesn’t, and hundreds of hitchhikers scurry into the walls in time for the opening credits. That title-card scroll plus a full credits sequence shows how much padding it took to clear the hour mark.
George’s new roommates couldn’t have picked a better home. The Paradiso Palms is a rundown Santa Monica complex where appliances break, the power cuts out and the elevator is a coin toss. Oh, and the lobby is springing a leak. Holding it all together with duct tape and a smile is Serena (Matilda Lutz, Revenge). She does every bit of the building manager’s job without the title or the paycheck. The slimy owner, Mr. Rossmore (William Miller, The 100), won’t give her either. He’s happy, though, to make her the one who hands out notices that the rent is going up.
That goes over about as well as you’d expect with the tenants, roughly 95 percent of whom are loud, rude and obnoxious. There’s an influencer who films his breakfast, a shut-in with an AI girlfriend and a pet snake, and a snob treating Serena like hired help. Let’s just say you won’t be heartbroken when the spiders start making house calls. The script hands Serena her late mother’s guitar, a dream of making music and a teenage neighbor to look after. That’s about all the character work anybody gets.
Move Over, Bruce
Every great nature-gone-wild movie feeds on whatever is keeping us up at night. In the 1950s, Them! and Tarantula turned atomic panic into giant bugs. In 2026, the monster is the rent. The Paradiso Palms is a horror show before a single spider shows up. A landlord squeezes every last dollar out of tenants stuck in apartments they can barely afford, and the movie just makes that trapped feeling literal.
When Serena finally lets herself into George’s apartment and finds what’s left of him, the authorities assume it’s a virus. They seal the building under a giant containment tent and leave everyone inside with a rapidly multiplying problem. If a locked-down building and a mysterious death blamed on disease sound familiar, there’s a reason. Cinematographer Pablo Rosso shot REC, the 2007 Spanish found-footage nightmare built on the very same quarantine. Move over, Bruce (that’s the mechanical shark from Jaws, for the uninitiated), because spiders might just be the new sharks.
Gómez Hernández, who made the Spanish haunted-house chiller Don’t Listen, wears his influences proudly. Stick around for the end credits, and you’ll spot a special thanks to Paul Naschy, the godfather of Spanish horror. As a kid, Naschy fell for Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. He grew up to write and star in a dozen films as his own cursed werewolf, Waldemar Daninsky. He’d have gobbled this up, gritty Euro-horror mixed with the kind of unapologetic creature-feature fun drive-ins were built for.
There’s a wink for classic monster fans, too. While spiders creep through potato chip bags and toward sleeping tenants, Serena curls up with Tarantula, unaware of what’s brewing in her walls. Keep an eye out for a young, uncredited Clint Eastwood leading the jet squadron in its finale. The producers at Thunder Road, the team behind John Wick, bring a dose of their relentless survival energy to the lockdown.
The Fun Is Before Anyone Notices
Like most creature features, this one is at its best before anyone knows what’s going on. Gómez Hernández and Rosso have a ball pushing how long the spiders can roam unnoticed, keeping us a step ahead of the tenants. My favorite gag involves an artist who spray paints a few of them into his latest canvas without realizing it. He turns his back, and then the “art” starts to move.
Once the tenants catch on, the screenplay by Jayson Rothwell (Polar) runs out of ideas in a hurry. People split up for no good reason, wander back to their apartments to wait for help and get picked off one by one. The spiders move like drones working for a serial killer, and something bigger is calling the shots. Their rules bend whenever the plot needs them to, and the tone ping-pongs between gritty survival horror and high camp.
The good news is that while the script is mundane, the spiders from effects houses PFX and Dazzle Pictures rarely look cartoonish. The swarms are genuinely creepy, though the gore and wounds look a bit plastic at times, which undercuts all that realism. I also didn’t care for a sequence in which a spider terrorizes a baby. I get why it’s there, but it isn’t scary enough to justify that kind of taboo shock.
Matilda Lutz Pays Her Dues
With a stronger cast and more reason to care about them, this might have been a lean, effective watch. Too many of the tenants are average performers working with recycled material from scene to scene. The bright spot is Lady Lash (Melina Matthews, The Room Next Door), a boozy upstairs dominatrix who isn’t afraid of a few creepy crawlers. Matthews is a hoot, and you should see what she has locked up in the next room. Her profession also hands Lutz a hilarious way to battle back a bunch of biting baddies near the finale. Here’s a hint: you have to dress your best to fight your best.
Lutz feels like she’s right on the edge of the role that pushes her into the big time. She was fantastic in 2017’s brutal Revenge and did strong work in the underseen Reptile on Netflix, playing opposite Justin Timberlake. She’s the saving grace here, too, throwing herself into one crazy set piece after another while the digital swarms pile on. Lutz puts herself through enough spider mayhem to earn triple points on the paying-my-dues scale.
Check Your Shoes Before You Check Out
Remember that bedtime story from the opening? If the spiders ever do come for us, at least we’d have a year to get our affairs in order. Crawlers needs only 75 minutes and still manages to overstay its welcome. Lutz and Lady Lash make it worth a look for die-hard spider-movie fans, and the swarms will do their job on the squeamish. Everyone else can check out early, but don’t blame me if you start shaking out your shoes before bed.
The Final
The swarms are creepy and Matilda Lutz earns her stripes, but a mundane script and plastic-looking gore leave this spider-infested lockdown feeling long, even at 75 minutes. Die-hard spider fans, shake out your shoes and dig in.
5/10
Where to watch: In theaters October 16 (Roadside Attractions and Saban Films)
Reviewed by Joe Botten
Joe Botten is The MN Movie Man, a Twin Cities film critic writing spoiler-free reviews since 2012. He also writes for Loud and Clear Reviews, a Rotten Tomatoes approved site. Find him on Instagram and Letterboxd.
Looking for something?
Search by actor, movie, director, genre or keyword.
Leave a Reply