A movie about a father-daughter duo being trapped and terrorized by alligators while a hurricane rages in Florida could find way worse ways to set up its suspense-horror story than Crawl (showing on SYFY this month — click here to scope the schedule).
Packing up after practice as a scholarship swimmer at the University of Florida (hey, what’s their mascot again?), Haley Keller (Kaya Scodelario) doesn’t seem all that concerned about the Category 5 hurricane sweeping in from offshore — until, that is, she gets a call from her panicky sister, who can’t get their dad on the phone. He’s divorced, living alone, and keeping family at arm’s length while he nurses some still-raw emotional wounds — and it’s up to Haley to drive into the approaching storm to make sure he’s safe and prepared.
Claustrophobia bites: Gators lurk around every creepy corner in Crawl
Barry Pepper plays Haley’s dad Dave, a guy whose well-meaning impulse to drive his daughter toward success parted ways, some time ago, with Haley’s own investment in her swimming career. In flashback memory scenes, he’s the alpha dad stalking the swimming pool deck, barking competitive coach-speak at young Haley in the water — including a constant reminder that she’s the “apex predator,” a phrase that carries double meaning once the story really gets rolling.
Haley and Dave aren’t estranged; they’re just distant: She still loves her dad and naturally wants to find him before the monster storm makes its landfall. With no sign of Dave at his single-guy condo, she concludes that he must be hanging out at their far-flung old coastal home — the last place the family lived together before the big divorce. Grabbing Dave’s dog before ditching the condo, Haley makes straight for the house… which lies directly in the hurricane’s path.
But wicked weather isn’t the main baddie in Crawl, as Haley ominously learns when she at last finds her dad bloody and unconscious in the grimy crawl space underneath the house. Something big must’ve gotten to him, and when he comes to, his news doesn’t sound too encouraging: Aided by the rising hurricane tide, an alligator has found free access to the home’s basement level, thanks to an unrepaired storm grate.
Dave’s already injured and can’t make the short climb up the crawl space’s stairs, and after her own early (and pretty gnarly) alligator encounter, Haley ends up bitten and playing hurt, too. Stuck behind the staircase where the giant gator can’t reach, they soon find — to their horror — that their unwelcome gator guest has invited a whole congregation of its alligator friends.
That only sets up the carnage to come in Crawl, a movie that spends most of its tidy 87-minute runtime claustrophobically pinned, right alongside Haley and her dad, in that dark and increasingly flooded crawl space. Hunted by gators as the floodwaters rise higher, it’s a shared-adversity way for dad and daughter to finally clear the air about their family’s troubled past, compelled by the very real possibility that they may not make it out of this ordeal alive.
Enjoy suspending your disbelief as Haley and Dave each wage loud, scream-y reptile war on opposite sides of the small space. Depending on what the scary story demands, they can alternately shout loud and clear messages to each other or else completely fail to hear the flailing danger that the other suddenly finds themselves in. But given the tightly-framed, close-up camera work that effectively draws you into the duo’s desperately cramped isolation, it’s not too grievous a sin in a movie where angry, hunger-agitated alligators lurk around just about every conceivable corner.
Despite some genuinely grisly wide-shot moments that drive home the deadly crunch of an alligator swarm in full feeding frenzy, no real gators were actually used in the making of Crawl. Horror director Alexandre Aja (Horns, The Hills Have Eyes, Piranha 3D) tapped both practical effects and CGI to create every apex predator you see onscreen (except for Haley herself, of course) — and by the end of this fright flick, you’ll have seen enough gator gore to cure you of any ambition to go schlepping through the Florida swamp in a hurricane.
Catch Crawl this month on SYFY — check the full TV schedule here!
