Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Crawl’ on Amazon Prime and Hulu, a Triple-Whammy in Which Alligators Attack During a Hurricane in Florida

If Crawl was on Syfy, it’d probably be titled GATORCANE! But the movie about Florida alligators attacking a college kid and her dad during a hurricane — now streaming free for Hulu and Amazon Prime subscribers — wants to be taken seriously. I mean, its chompings, gnashings and thrashings are rendered in non-cheap lifelike CGI, a character almost has an actual arc and it doesn’t nudge you in the ribs every 30 seconds. But should we take it seriously? A question for the ages, no doubt. 

CRAWL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Haley (Kaya Scodelario) can swim like the dickens because her dad Dave (Barry Pepper) always pushed her. But this morning, she didn’t swim all that great. She attends the University of Florida and, among the school’s many competitive swimmers wearing orange caps that say GATORS on them, she’s in danger of not qualifying for the travel team, putting her scholarship in jeopardy. Flashback to when she was a kid, getting ready for a meet: Dad motivates her by saying, “APEX PREDATOR!” and she repeats it back, “APEX PREDATOR!”, a phrase that they probably wouldn’t say unless they were in a movie where they’re desperately trying to avoid being masticated to death by gargantuan alligators.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. How do they end up in a situation where they’re avoiding being masticated to death by gargantuan alligators? Well, there’s a category-5 hurricane slamming the crap out of Florida, which is an APEX PREDATOR of a hurricane if there ever was one. Haley and her sister, who lives far away, haven’t been able to reach their dad, and they’re worried. So Haley defies her cop friend’s orders and drives through the storm to the house where they grew up but is being sold because their mom and dad are getting divorced, and finds her old man in the crawl space, unconscious, with bite marks in his shoulder and a gruesomely messed-up leg. Or did the leg injury happen later? I forget. Doesn’t matter — he’s in bad shape, as happens when an alligator roughly the size of an excavator tries to eat you.

Just as Haley tries to drag Dave out, the thing with the teeth that bit him, the alligator roughly the size of an excavator, tries to bite her too. She drags him to safety behind some pipes where the gator can’t reach, then goes back into the danger zone to get her phone and call for help, because a crawl space during an extinction-level hurricane is an ideal space to get a signal. The gator grabs her, but she stabs the gator in the eye with a screwdriver and escapes. Now what? Tourniquet time! And the storm didn’t stop, so the crawl space is filling with water: eight inches, 10 inches, 11 inches, 11.3 inches, 11.6 inches, 11.8 inches, 12.1 inches, 12.8 inches, 13 inches, you know, like that, because even if the physics of the gator attacks sometimes seems questionable, the physics of the flood are at least consistent. How’d they get in there? A drainage pipe. To the crawl space? Of a residential home? Yes, a drainage pipe of very large diameter, now please shut up.

So: Will they become gator Meow Mix? Will they drown? Will they bleed to death? Will Haley’s cop pal come help them? Will Haley and her dad get an opportunity to talk out their issues? Will Haley have to swim like an APEX PREDATOR to save them? Most importantly, will their pet dog barking at the top of the stairs survive the ordeal? OH SPOILERS, I FORESAKE THEE.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: In 1980, a movie called Alligator perpetuated the myth of animals being flushed into sewers and mutating to abnormally huge sizes. It was LEGENDARY. Otherwise, Crawl is Jaws in a house mixed with very wet disaster movies like The Impossible, Titanic and, um, The Poseidon Adventure. Oh, and one sequence seems very much inspired by Aliens.

Performance Worth Watching: Scodelario really does dig in and show a lot of grit here, rendering a very silly movie a little more effective than it probably should be. The shoot must have been exhausting.

Memorable Dialogue: The next time I spot a spider in the basement, I’m going to yell “APEX PREDATOR” before I smash it with a Pringles can, so I can feel like a winner.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: I do not understand the structural necessities of a house built on Florida wetlands. Neither am I a herpetologist or a doctor. Which means I have many questions: Why does an average home have a crawl space with access to a drainage pipe large enough for very large alligators to fit through it? Do all homes have such a pipe? Is it me, or does the crawl space in the movie lie beneath a 12,000 square-foot house? If the gators attacking Haley and Dave are too big to fit under the pipes to reach them, where are the smaller gators that could fit under the pipes? Do they just grows ’em real big down ‘ere? Do alligators really growl like that? How fast can they swim? Faster than a competitive human swimmer in peak condition? What’s a cop or two going to do anyway? Blast ’em? Bait ’em with sheep? And how many puncture wounds can a human person endure before they bleed all their blood out the holes?

Crawl is ridiculous but effective, and just tense and plausible enough to invoke the demon of claustrophobia and our primordial fear of being munched and digested to death. Such are the film’s modest ambitions. Ninety minutes, in and out. It doesn’t even spend much time on the father-daughter dysfunction stuff — just enough to feel perfunctory, so Haley and Dave have even the slightest of inner lives to save along with their skins, and so we don’t quite want to root for the alligators. But mostly we want the people to survive so they can save the dog. Priorities!

So back to the taking-it-seriously question. This thing barely — and only JUST barely — stops short of including a scene where Haley swims so fast, the two gators converging on her slam into each other in a commotional tumult of toothy, spiny slapstick. The logistical reality of the crawl space is a confusional thing, bowing purely to the film’s desire to stage different types of alligator attacks. But it stirs up enough tension and scares (and laughs, nervous, unintentional or otherwise) to make it a worthy slab of genre escapism.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Six miles an hour. That’s how fast a human can swim. Gators? Twenty. Twenty miles an hour. And yet, Crawl is enjoyable anyway.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

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