Review: Crawl

Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

Alexandre Aja's "Crawl" seeks to answer a time honored question: Why does anyone live in Florida? Like, seriously. This relatively short and often bloody horror movie features a young woman and her father - and anyone unlucky enough to attempt to try to help them - tormented by massive, nasty alligators that have overtaken their house during an enormous storm most likely brought on by global warming.

We get one of those obligatory scene setters in which Haley (Kaya Scodelario), a college swimmer, doesn't give it her all during a swim team practice, and we get a flashback of her father, Dave (Barry Pepper), telling her as a young girl that she's an "apex predator," although I'm not sure that's normally something you'd want to call your daughter, and that she's not a quitter. Naturally, as I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn, this comes into play once they're stuck in a home filled with rising water and hungry gators.

Haley and Dave are seemingly not talking as the film opens for reasons never quite divulged, although it likely has something to do with his split from Haley's mother. Haley's sister calls to ask her to check on her father, who has made the foolish decision to visit the family's old property located on the coast as a major storm system descends on the area, to ensure he's safe. Soon after Haley - and her pup - arrive at the scene, she's being attacked by one of the reptiles in the basement. She finds her injured father and the two spend the rest of the movie attempting to not become gator snacks.

If the plot sounds thin and the characters' decisions often silly to the point of a head shake, it's because they are. However, the impressive set pieces and obvious skill that went into the making of the film, much of which involves people making their way through rooms full of water and clogged with debris, almost make up for how silly the entire endeavor is.

Aja has talent as a director - his breakout film, "High Tension," was deeply unsettling and somewhat provocative, his "Piranha" remake was deliriously gory and "Horns" was, well... it was something - and this is obviously on display here. Do I wish that he'd apply those skills to a horror movie that digs a little deeper, rather than a by-the-numbers genre exercise? Yes, of course. But as far as entries into the animals-gone-wild genre go, you could do much worse than "Crawl."