All I wanted to see was alligators chomp on some humans. What I got was some family drama.
Plot: A young woman, while attempting to save her father during a category 5 hurricane, finds herself trapped in a flooding house and must fight for her life against alligators.
Crawl is a typical B-movie horror flick with a simple concept of a woman, her father and their dog being stuck in a house during a huge flood caused by a raging storm, and there just happens to be a bunch of cool alligators swimming around chomping on human flesh. This movie had a simple purpose - be stupid, ridiculous, gory, over-the-top fun. You know, typical Sam Raimi stuff (on producing duties here). Though we do get some of that, with the final 20 minutes especially standing out with its hectic ludicrous madness, however those moments are so far and few with the rest of the film being quite the dud.
The first half an hour especially suffers from a very boring set-up giving us characters we do not care about, and this comes due to the film’s biggest fault, with its attempt at giving us real substance by forcing a family drama sub-plot to the whole thing that simply did not mesh well with the B-movie style the film was going for overall. Look, I like my dramas, but forcing them into a campy gore-fest is not the way to go about it. Thus the movie has huge spreads of boredom, with really only about 40 minutes of total thrills. Also, the jump scares here were so obvious a blind man would see them from a mile away.
Kaya Scodelario as the leading lady does fine, screaming whenever necessary and all that jazz, but I did not care about her or Barry Pepper’s character, more-so because of the misplaced drama of their relationship. The alligators were awesome though, and so was the family dog, which adorable as is supposed to be. Generally though this is a very forgettable piece of campy horror that decided to take itself way too seriously and thus suffers for it.
