Crawl (film)

Crawl is a 2019 horror film featuring 5 alligators.

8 out of 10 stars.  There’s a silly subplot in this film that I absolutely hated.  Otherwise it would be a great film.

Dave Keller is a divorced father of two adult girls who runs a construction business.  He’s in the process of selling their old family house and he’s depressed.  He makes the mistake of going to visit the old house right before a category 5 hurricane hits and is attacked by a huge alligator who has built her nest under the house in a runoff pipe that leads to the adjacent lake.  When Keller doesn’t answer his phone his oldest daughter Beth calls his youngest daughter Haley at school (University of Florida) to check on him.  Haley drives two hours south (vague about where this is going) to check on her father.  She finds him in the crawl space under the house with a broken leg having been attacked by a full grown female alligator.

The two work together to try to escape, only to discover there are five alligators.  Meanwhile the hurricane is still coming and the house is flooding.

So there is a lot of misinformation circulating about this film.  It’s filmed in Serbia and Canada, NOT Florida.  The shots in Gainesville are indoors.  The shots outside don’t really look like Florida, but they did a pretty good job disguising that fact.  This actually does look similar to Homosassa Springs, Florida which is where this supposedly takes place.  (Not Tampa as erroneously reported).  Homosassa has a lot of moss and little lakes along with a river that’s home to dugongs (manatees).  Homosassa is famous for it.  There are also giant alligators in Homosassa.

The side plot that really kind of ruined the film was a variation on the birth story (which I absolutely hate) in which Dave and Haley reminisce about when he was her swim coach and used to tell her she was an apex predator all day long to get her to not sulk when she lost.  That was her motivational pitch.  She uses that line later after she outswims the big mother alligator (which is totally possible; gators are not sharks).  It sounded really juvenile and dumb.

Other than that you will find familiar scenes taken from other great creature features:  (1) the shower/bathtub scene (seen in the photo) is similar to the oven scene in Deep Blue Sea; (2) Haley walking along floating furniture in the kitchen is similar to the scene with Dr. McAllister walking along floating furniture trying to get her data disk in Deep Blue Sea; (3) the nest scene is very similar to the nest scene in the Australian crocodile film Black Water; (4) the alligator through the glass window scene is very similar to the shark through the glass window scene in Deep Blue Sea.  The category 5 hurricane is totally new.

There were some plot holes but they’re very specific that only people who live in Florida would notice (like the slowly rising water–it would’ve been much faster).  And that the main actress is obviously not American (too tall for a swimmer and she’s got black teeth from being a heavy smoker–swimmers would never smoke).  Still a great film.

8 out of 10 stars.  This is a nice creature feature film to add to your collection.