Crawl Review: Alexandre Aja delivers bite-sized fun in this literal monster in the house horror- thr

No sensible person goes to see a movie about killer alligators and then complains that it was silly and over the top.

Right?

Well, if you were one of those people complaining at the end of the film, then Culturedemandsgeeks holds no hope for y’all.

PLOT:

It’s hurricane season in Gainesville, where high-achieving swimmer Haley Keller (yip,  The Maze Runner and Skins stars, Kaya Scodelario) emerges from a practice race to troubling news: Her far-off sister has been unable to reach their father (Barry Pepper’s Dave), who lives in the path of a major storm and doesn’t seem to have heeded evacuation orders.

Haley promises to go check on him, skirting road blocks and good sense, only to find his truck parked outside their childhood home but nobody inside.

Turns out he’s in the icky crawlspace beneath the house, where he was incapacitated during a plumbing repair. The giant gator that wounded him is still down there, and soon, father and daughter are both trapped below the floorboards, hiding in the few spots the monster can’t reach.

Torrential rain is slowly flooding the neighborhood, and any viewer who suspects a single alligator isn’t enough for this kind of film will soon be proved right in a very big way.

And those scaly beasts, whose numbers rapidly multiply, and who soon control nearly every bit of real estate our heroes might hope to slither to (and yip, you guessed it, they have to escape!)

The film is the kind of action-packed B picture that just lets you be totally engrossed within the film, despite some ludicrous action scenes and risible (iffy) dialogue.

The director, Alexandre Aja (“High Tension,” “The Hills Have Eyes”), brings the critters to life through a combination of digital imagery, scale models, and (maybe) real-life alligators, all which add up to an impressively believable image of natural-born chomping fear.

After Aja broke out with his ferocious 2003 slasher High Tension, a film that kicked off a string of hardcore French horrors, he’s had a patchy time in Hollywood. His remakes of The Hills Have Eyes and Piranha were most effective. And then we had the movies such as, Mirrors and Horns less so, and good luck finding anyone who’s even heard of his last film, (yip, we couldn’t, either).

FINAL VERDICT:

But with Crawl, it is shameless a fun B-Grade movie with a rousing fun premise. It’s a solid, crowd-pleasing reminder that he knows his genre, an 87-minute exercise in pushing the premise of the film of scares and the unbelievable threat of those jaw-munching alligators biting down on Kaya.

The film may not win any awards, it may be in the bargain buckets before you know it, but it’s worth a punt just to watch those alligators play cat and mouse with the film’s stars.

The lean running means Aja has gotten this film right on the nose (ha, the alligator’s nose), quite often successful and thrilling set-pieces, and then securing audience members disbelief to the very edge of their seats.

4/5 STARS