Crawl Parent Guide

As Crawl opens in theaters nationwide, Tropical Storm Barry is barreling into New Orleans. This is an uncanny coincidence, Crawl being all about a particularly horrific hurricane. The movie focuses on the experience of Haley Keller (Kaya Scodelario), who leaves a routine swim meet only to learn that a state of emergency has been declared in Florida after a Category 5 hurricane has changed directions. With her father (Barry Pepper) not answering his phone, Haley decides to evacuate him on her own. But once Haley finds him, she realizes that the hurricane isn’t their biggest problem: the storm surge flooding has allowed some massive alligators to swim into their home and getting her injured father out of the crawl space is going to be harder than she thought.

If that premise sounds a little goofy to you, it is. But that’s the joy of this movie: it has no presumptions or pretensions to be anything smarter or grander than it is. It’s essentially a survival/horror movie like Alien mashed up with a classic disaster movie. With a combination like that, the movie can’t help but be fun, fast-paced, and suspenseful. If the storm doesn’t get you, the gators will.

Titanic aside, whenever a disaster film tries to get emotionally intimate, it falls apart. The weakest part of these films is invariably the long-winded personal conversations that drag the pacing down to a crawl and leave the audience waiting impatiently for something to flood, freeze, explode, or catch fire. Crawl succeeds by having some personal conflict that the characters are forced to work through but making them smart enough to realize that the middle of a gator hurricane is not the time to start talking about how you blame yourself for your parents’ divorce.

While this isn’t a film for younger kids by any stretch, older teens who enjoy a good scare will have a blast. The profanity will be parents’ primary concern, but I must admit that if I were being chased by a 300 pound reptile during a Category 5 hurricane, I might drop a few “gosh-darn-its” myself. The violence is often terrifying, but no worse than you’d expect from this kind of movie, and less graphic than it could have been. With one exception, there are no drawn-out shots of people being messily devoured - either they get a nasty bite, or they just get dragged into the water and are never seen again.

So, while Crawl may not be in contention for this year’s Academy Award for Best Picture, it’s definitely near the top of my list for those big, dumb, fun movies you wait for all summer. Like Jaws before it, Crawl has realized that sharp-toothed, primordial beasts that swim faster than you are scary, but Crawl also discovered that it’s much scarier if they can move beyond the beach.