PLOT SUMMARY: Hayley is searching for her father during a hurricane when she finds herself facing a bigger threat: alligators.
The thing about using animals and reptiles in horror movies is that the shock elements wear off pretty quickly.
One of the characters will be wandering about when the first attack from a creature occurs. That scene will probably make you jump. Where did that come from?
Then another attack occurs and you’ll find yourself thinking, oh wow, these creatures are dangerous. How is the protagonist going to deal with it?
Then a third happens, and a fourth...and the fear element is starting to wear thin. At this point, which is mostly in the second half, you’ll just be rooting for the creature to be defeated. You don’t fear it anymore. It’s become repetitive, you know all the moves the creature makes. There’s no surprise element and therefore nothing new to fear.
Now if said creature was possessed...that’s an entirely different story now. Wild creatures will keep attacking, relentlessly. But if writing about haunted creatures, there’s a mystery to develop about them. Why were they possessed? How did they die? How will they be defeated?
This is not to say that alligators aren’t scary on their own. And a horror movie doesn’t need to have ghosts and themes of possession all the time, but the issue is that writing about these vicious creatures is tricky. Everything there is to know about them is answered in the firsts scene itself.
They attack, they pursue and they just want to kill.
Crawl takes a bit of a different approach where the story is concentrated on Hayley and her swimming abilities.
She’s been swimming all her life with her father as her coach. Then he separates from his wife, the family becomes estranged. Hayley’s sister Beth is happily married with a baby, and Hayley is struggling with keeping time in swimming races.
She’s just a bit behind and feels dejected because of it. That’s the first scene so you know toward the end of the movie, there will just have to be a scene wherein she is going to swim as fast as she can. And there is.
CRAWL Movie Plot
As soon as Hayley comes out of swim practice, she receives a video call from Beth telling her the storm is going to hit their city after all. She also tells her that their father Dave hasn’t picked any of her calls and she needs to check on him.
Hayley obliges and sets off in her red Jeep to go see him. On the way, she passed a sign that warns about alligators in the area.
The rain is coming down pretty hard and the entrance into the town where her father lives is blocked. She meets Beth’s ex-boyfriend who is now a cop as well. He forbids Hayley from going further. At first, she’s like, okay. But then she has a change of heart and takes the alternate route.
She needs to see her father at all cost.
She reaches his house, doesn’t find any sign that he’s inside except for his dog Sugar. When she sees pictures of the family strewn about, she decides that her father must have gone to the old family home because he was allegedly making a sale.
Hayley heads there with Sugar and finds her father’s truck parked outside. She goes inside and finds his phone there as well with several missed calls from Beth. And then, of course, the phone has run out of battery and needs to be charged.
Yes, one of the annoying things about cell phones is that they never work in horror movies. Ever. They never come to anyone’s aid. All these apps and they never assist when things go downhill for the characters.
Hayley decides to go to the basement, when Sugar barks at it, and where all the pipes are and finds evidence that her father is down here. There’s a screwdriver in the side and it’s a good thing she doesn’t pick it up right now because she will need to use it later. When she sees blood on the pipes she now understands something has happened to her father. She calls out to him, crawling faster in search of him.
She reaches the back of the basement and finds her father unconscious. She listens for his heartbeat and is relieved when she hears it. But there’s also a wound from which he’s bleeding profusely and it looks like someone clawed at him.
Hayley puts him on a sheet so she can drag him under the pipes. She almost makes it to the stairs when she hears a snarl. She has a brief moment to look up when her flashlight shines on the alligator.
Hayley is horrified but now is tasked with saving herself and her father who is still unconscious. She rushes ahead, dragging the sheet on which her father is while the alligator just wants a bite and races toward her.
At the back of the basement is where the pipes are lower and where the alligator can’t get through. The alligator leaves after trying to snap at them.
Dave comes to and tells Hayley the obvious that they are safe over here in this spot because of the pipes.
Hayley wants to call for help and of course, her traitorous phone has fallen while she was crawling about. She goes ahead to retrieve it and is of course almost attacked by the gator, and then learns another horrifying thing: there’s more than one alligator.
While getting away, the alligator snaps at her leg and drags her away but she manages to free herself by using a screwdriver.
She’s in another spot of the basement where there are pipes.
Dave knows his daughter isn’t fine and asks her to go for plan B which is an alternate opening that would lead upstairs. Hayley reaches the spot and tries to push open the hatch door but there’s something over it. She does see Sugar who helplessly barks. He’s a dog. He can’t move whatever weight is on the door.
The storm gets rough. There’s now water pouring in as well. Hayley uses her flashlight to signal three people she sees at the store across. These three people are thieves who are stealing ATM machines, chips and sausages. Yet, they stop when they see a flashlight.
One of them goes toward it while the woman on the boat is chomped away by the alligator. Soon the other two are devoured as well while Hayley helplessly watches.
She tries to swim and look for alternate openings and manages to get the attention of the police who are on a boat and making sure everyone has evacuated.
Beth’s ex reaches the basement door before he is killed by the gator. The other one is investigating a moving swing and is killed by several alligators.
CRAWL Ending Explained with Spoilers!
Now we know there are too many alligators for Hayley to fend off. She swims through the drain where the alligators have supposedly entered the house. There, she finds the alligators have laid eggs. One of them has already hatched and hoping for a role in the sequel if there will be one.
Hayley manages to get out by shooting an alligator, just as Dave is about to drown. She gets him out, breaks into the store across by swimming faster than the alligators and manages to get a boat.
Dave and Hayley get on the boat only for the storm to push them and their boat right back into the house. This was a bit comical as it seemed the storm decided that nope, you need to stay at home and suffer more horror.
Dave and Hayley are separated, though he has Sugar with him.
But he’s attached by a gator who chomps his arm off.
Hayley manages to find a radio and send a distress signal but the alligators still aren’t done with her and want to chomp at her arm.
Dave and Sugar make it to the attic and wait on the roof. Hayley uses a flare to stab the alligator and rushes upstairs to sit with her father, share a nice moment and then wave down the helicopter with another flare...she had been carrying?
The movie had some intense portions but after some time, the snapping and alligators chasing the characters became kind of tedious. The storm could have intensified the proceedings but only seems to want the characters to stay at home by pushing them right back in.
Scare scale: 3/5
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