Crawl (Blu-ray)

Heck, this is a good one! A well crafted, taut horror/thriller that stressed me out no end! I was especially concerned about Sugar the dog!Alexandre Aja has always been an interesting director. I enjoyed the bonkers nature of Switchblade Romance (High Tension in America) and the twisted love story in Horns. The cruelty in The Hills Have Eyes remake was a sight to behold and Mirrors was just weird. So I at least owed it to him to give Crawl a go. Glad I did!Trapped by some gators under a house with an external threat of a hurricane, Haley must try to save her injured father before it's too late!For a single location film it flies by! The pace is fast and the script is tight. You can see the Sam Raimi influences with the bits of humour thrown in and listening to him in the bonus features on Blu-ray, you can tell he got a kick out of producing it!The practical special effects are pretty gruesome in a few occasions and the visual effect gators are outstanding at times! Sometimes they don't look so good though.It's well acted by Kaya Scodelario who I didn't know was English! Usually English actors doing American accents stand out a mile because most are awful but she did a great job! Very solid performance. Barry Pepper, who is always reliable, plays her dad, essentially trapped and doomed without his daughters help.The sound design is pretty spot on, the rears light up when Haley is being chased by the gators and the storm scenes outside circle around as if you are in it!I would have liked a 4K release but the picture quality on the Blu-ray is top end. Nice, thin film grain layer so it doesn't look too soft.Overall a well made and acted small horror film and worth a buy on Blu-ray.

Nice movie easy to switch off from life & enjoy a story away from reality.

A great taught thriller rather than an out and out horror. Tension and pace are balanced well overall and despite some parts of the plot and gator behaviour stretching credulity overall the movie, led by some good performances and a rising sense of danger, delivers enough bite to make it well worth the watch.

That movie title fits this movie perfectly. Without watching the movie and just based on the title and the film poster you can bet this movie is all about something to do with crawling(squat walking). It provides much of the suspense with a few jump scares that we want with our horror movies. Plus its the ultimate escape room challenge with having to escape a crawl space with gators around and a hurricane quickly filling the space. We did enjoy this movie more than what was originally shown in the trailer and previews. One might see the trailer and say "looks stupid" (like us) but once you watch it, its a decent horror suspense movie.

For most of the film with two people it really keeps you on you hook. It's really good film

This film was determined to be average, and by God it succeeded. It hit its ‘beats’. The characters had ‘arcs’. It had a ‘three-act structure’. It’s like a boring equation for which the answer is “a horror movie”: you have to admit it: that’s the answer, but it’s still boring. Maybe this is because there’s almost no humour in the film, which is sort of incredible, given how ludicrous it all is. Also incredible is how sloppy the film is in its use of space: I mean, its selling point is its use of an extremely limited set - and yet I almost never knew where the characters were in relation to one another. I always knew where the characters were in Alien, and that was set on a spaceship; but in this film, which is set in a basement, I could never tell how far apart the characters were, where the gators were supposed to be, etc. Oh, well. It passed the time in a mostly competent manner.

Whilst this is a good horror film and made me scream in lots of places, the dialogue is poor and the acting is not great in places. Would be better if the story was a bit more complex. Worth watching if free on a subscription service but not sure if it is worth keeping on blu-ray.

I thought this was a pretty decent thriller and certainly enjoyed it a little more than i did Deep Blue Sea when i first seen that. It does have some decent gory parts in it and some good special effects and the acting isn't to bad either. I liked Alexandre Aja's Hills Have Eyes remake when it hit the cinema many moons ago and i think that Crawl is a pretty decent effort from him and was better than the piranha remake that he made back in 2010. 7.5/10