Crawl (2019) (Blu-ray)

by - October 15th, 2019 - Blu-ray and DVD

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How does the Blu-ray/DVD Disc stack up? (all ratings out of 10.)
  • Movie8
  • Video9
  • Audio9
  • Extras6
  • Overall8

SYNOPSIS

“Apex predator all day…”

Haley Keller

CRITIQUE

Here’s what I wrote about this one in my original theatrical review:

Crawl (2019) | Paramount Pictures

“After receiving a worried call from her older sister Beth (Morfydd Clark), University of Florida swimmer Haley Keller (Kaya Scodelario) drives the two hours to their father Dave’s (Barry Pepper) house to make sure everything is okay. There is a Category 5 hurricane bearing down on the region and no one has been able to get a hold of him to make sure he’s evacuated. Beth promises to track him down, and even though their family home appears to be empty, dad’s construction truck is in the driveway and his cellphone is sitting on the kitchen counter.

Turns out, he was underneath the house in the crawlspaces battening everything down for the hurricane when he was attacked by an alligator. Haley knows this because she went down there after hearing his radio and now she’s trapped, too, a pair of the animals stalking them looking for ways to get through the wall of pipes currently offering up protection. Worse, the hurricane is now upon them, and pretty soon they’ll be underwater with no chance of escape. Working together Haley and Dave must find a way to either get back upstairs or to call authorities for assistance. With floodwaters rising there’s now a swarm of alligators on the hunt, and just one false move will be all it would take for father and daughter to become a midafternoon snack for the pack of green-scaled aquatic predators.

Crawl is an unpretentious creature-feature from The Hills Have Eyes and High Tension filmmaker Alexandre Aja that’s every bit of gnarly fun as its ludicrous premise makes one hope it is going to be. Eschewing the cartoonish nastiness of his 2010 3-D Piranha remake (which is also quite entertaining), the filmmaker returns to his down-and-dirty roots as he presents a straightforward thriller of two people in peril doing all they can to survive against overwhelming odds. His presentation of Michael Rasmussen and Shawn Rasmussen’s (The Ward) sturdy script is free from a lot of unnecessary bells and whistles, Aja allowing the inherent terror of the situation Haley and Dave find themselves in to do the majority of the heavy lifting for him.

Not that Scodelario and Pepper aren’t given plenty to play around with. Haley and Dave’s familial dynamic is suitably complicated, both harboring secret anxieties and pains they’ve not done a particularly good job dealing with on their own. While none of what either character is going through is hardly imaginative, their intimate emotional dexterities do help give the story an additional layer that makes the pair’s dual fight to keep from becoming gator fodder even more affecting than it otherwise already was. Both actors revel in these moments of confrontation, recrimination, understanding and forgiveness, Scodelario particularly so, her determined tenacity frequently sensational.

Crawl (2019) | Paramount Pictures

None of this really matters, of course, as part of what gives the film its visceral kick is watching all of the almost superhuman (but not quite) ways in which father and daughter manage to overcome most of the toothy obstacles standing in their hurricane-ravaged path. Not since 2016’s The Shallows has a major Hollywood studio-produced minimalist creature-feature proven to be so much unabashed fun. Aja directs with total confidence, orchestrating all of the carnage with energetic gusto. The film is also grandly shot by veteran Maxime Alexandre (Shazam!) and exuberantly scored by Max Aruj (The Abandoned) and Steffen Thum (Warning Shot). Crawl is one the most enjoyably suspenseful films I’ve had the pleasure to see this summer, and I can’t wait to submerge myself again underneath its tense waters for a second time very, very soon.”

Crawl has emerged from underneath the cinematic water to not-so-quietly become one of my favorite films of 2019. Alexandre Aja has crafted one of his best films, and I could see myself returning to this nifty little creature-feature multiple times over the coming years.

THE VIDEO

Crawl is presented on a 50GB Blu-ray MPEG-4 AVC Video with a 2.39:1 1080p transfer.

THE AUDIO

This Blu-ray features an English DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 soundtrack along with Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese and Thai Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks and includes optional English, English SDH, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Cantonese, Hindi, Korean, Malay, Mandarin (Simplified) and Thai subtitles.

THE EXTRAS

Extras here include:Intro to Alternate Opening (0:25)

Alternate Opening (4:49)
Deleted and Extended Scenes (6:03)
“Beneath Crawl” featurette (28:05)
Category 5 Gators: The VFX of Crawl (11:37)
Alligator Attacks (1:32)

The “Beneath Crawl” featurette is a bit better than most extras of this type, while the visual effects extra will certainly be of interest to many fans of the film. But the big draw here is the alternate opening, presented as a dynamically drawn motion comic. It’s Aja at his most cut throat and lethal which makes it fairly obvious why this introduction to the movie was excised before it even had the chance to go before the cameras.

DVD and a Digital Copy of the film are both included with this release.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Crawl works. There’s not much else to say. Alexandre Aja has crafted one of the better thrillers of 2019, this nifty little creature-feature a bloody little aquatic home invasion hurricane blast that only gets better with each subsequent viewing. While I’d have liked a 4K release, Paramount’s Blu-ray presentation is still nothing less than excellent, fans of the title almost certain to be satisfied when they add this disc to their personal collection.

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