Directed By Angel Gomez Hernandez

Starring – Matilda Lutz, Gregg Sulkin, Melina Matthews

The Plot – Tenants at Paradiso Palms apartments fight a deadly spider invasion while the cunning building maintenance worker (Lutz) might be their only hope for survival.

Rated R for violent content/bloody images, adult language and brief sexual material.

Crawlers | Official: Trailer | In Theaters October 16

POSITIVES

While the publicized perception with arachno-horror since the dawn of cinema has always been if you’ve seen one, you’ve likely seen them all, there are some endearing elements to Hernandez’s enthralling execution that at least makes the fil slightly better than previously expected, beginning with Angel’s own effortlessly immersive direction, which spikes the phobic hysteria of those in the audience with even a slight reservation towards eight legged freaks. Angel’s experienced instincts thrive under the pressure of an inconsistent film that feels like it’s subconsciously working against his efforts, both with an atmospherically culminated brand of tension, as a result of advantageous foreshadowing through sequencing that allows the audience to interpret the attacks in real time, long before they’ve actually transpired, but also this self-awareness towards tonality that allows the characters and situations to revel endlessly in their campily constructed chaos, resulting in a solid combination between thrills and hilarious spills that never gave the material an incremental chance of irresponsibly taking itself too seriously. Beyond Hernandez’s helming, the film also maintains urgency throughout a sparse 76-minute runtime, that keeps the redundancy and derivativity of the material from ever overstaying its welcome, resulting in a brisky and breezy brand of storytelling that keeps impatience from setting in on the audience. This is felt most evidently in the extent of the opening act, where the extensive magnitude of the plot materializes within the opening twenty minutes, allowing for an entire hour of creepily crawling confrontation that feels tangibly influential as a result of the firm balance between practical and special effects work bringing these legions of spiders to life before our very eyes. The special effects present themselves in the designs of the spiders themselves, where with the assistance of some clever camera tricks to the movie’s presentation, as well as wide lenses to document their depiction, they’re effortlessly able to attain believability in everything from their textural integrities to the unpredictably sudden springing of their leaping attacks, combining with practicality towards gruesome lesions and gnarly lacerations, to elicit these revolting stakes that feel influentially evident without feeling unnecessarily exploitative. Likewise, while the writing of the characters leaves a lot to be desired in assembling empathy and relatability to a single one of them, the lead performance from Matilda Lutz is undoubtedly the ensemble’s strongest force with her grounded performance, where her scathing discontent for tenant snobbery affords her the caustically underlining kind of wit that perseveres throughout flat dialogue, offering enough irritable personality to overlook a script that feels like it forgot to flesh out the backstory of her character’s history. While Lutz’s most defining moments are undoubtedly those away from the devastation, specifically her bickering banter with the building’s absentee property manager, she proves her turn is anything but one-dimensional with enough resiliency during physically demanding sequences that prove her to be so much more than just another pretty face protagonist, in a role that takes minimal time for Lutz to grow naturally into.

NEGATIVES

Unfortunately, while ‘Crawlers’ does have more going for it than initially expected, it’s still on the forgettable side of arachno-horror thrillers of the contemporary age, specifically with some plunging perils with the unimpressive screenplay that condemns the characters and the storytelling alike. For the characters, Lutz’s Serena is given very little substance throughout the first half of the film to fall back on psychologically, with only the tediously tacked-on additive of an afterthought of a disconnected backstory with her distant mother, during the film’s last half hour, to spring some semblance of humanity that is tragically missing from the proceedings, but even with the rest of snootily snobbish tenants, there’s an interchangeable derivativity to their designs that not only keeps any of them from standing out singularly as the prick in the room, but also underscores the projected delight that should spring naturally from their untimely demises, leaving no kind of circumstantial influence to their inclusion, leaving the entirety of them overwhelmed by one-dimensional outlines that leave opportunity on the outside of the single stage setting. As for the storytelling itself, beyond the construction of the plot during the film’s opening act, there’s such a crucial lack of advancement, plotting and progression of both the eight-legged antagonists and the dynamics of their humanistic adversaries to ultimately keep this from feeling so unavoidably predictable, especially considering so many of the characters are corrupted by bafflingly braindead decisions that leave them vulnerable for anything-but-spontaneous attacks. While I understand that stupid decisions have been a part of these kind of movies for many decades, it doesn’t excuse or justify a character sticking his hand directly on the inside of an elevator light, instead of pushing it closed from underneath it, or even a health department quarantine member who takes off his helmet while inside of the building, in order for an interacting tenant to hear him, and though the overwhelming ratio of spiders to humans is already enough to articulate overwhelming vulnerability towards the latter, the script instead concerns itself with making them as impossibly idiotic as possible towards combating them, resulting in these unavoidable genre-approved archetypes who can be summarized by a single sentence of no more than eight words to encompass them. Beyond the grievances with the script, the presentational aspects of the production are just as compromising towards the interpretation of the audience, emitting these outdated sensibilities to both the cinematography and the score, which has this movie feeling like it was plucked directly out of 2002. That unflattering assessment serves as a result of techno-heavy instrumental themes that frequently feel energetically improper to the sequences they audibly adorn, with a lack of varietal versatility so repetitive and lazily conforming that it fails to emphasize the imagery with any semblance of intensity or grittiness, leaving the claustrophobic chaos of its distinguished setting falling so crucially flat and underscored by its lackadaisical meandering. As for the shots from cinematographer Pablo Rosso, while I commend his instinctual approach towards lighting and the contortion of the lens, in order to convey the captivity of the chaos from within the building, it becomes painfully frenetic whenever its upside down photography collides with physical conflicts, giving a contorted clarity over the integrity of the visuals, in between these obnoxious edits in frame that constantly deviate back and forth between varied proximities, offering a disjointedly jarring portrayal that feels like student film levels of experimentation and alienation. Finally, even the satisfaction of the resolution is significantly detracted by its incessant need to cater for a sequel that it will inevitably never earn, instead of offering satisfying resolution that will end the film on the kind of high note that will help override so much of its mediocrity. Considering the set-up itself requires a bit more suspension of disbelief than expected in characters effectively evading unfavorable outcomes, it’s made increasingly aggravating by convenient flash forwards that overlook some of the glaring unanswered questions stemming from its situational scope, leaving the audience to capably and coherently fill in the gaps where the movie sees fit, all the while underscoring such an inescapable conflict with convenient alleviation behind every corner.

OVERALL
Crawlers is a skin-tingling spider showcase that might weave a web of intrigue between a campily self-aware tone and seamlessly-slinging effects work, but is ultimately and unfortunately humbled by a plain script and a plundering presentation that undercuts the momentum from its vulnerably articulated thrills, elicited alongside empathetically marginalized options among characters who are more akin to types than fully fleshed out people. While the film provides enough fast-paced frenzy that occasionally gets the blood pumping for those uncontrollably squirming in their seats from their own fearful phobias, for the rest of us it’s tangled terror lacking the necessary bite to stand out from the legion of predecessors, surmising a condemning counterproductive chamber-piece that continuously trips over its own eight legs.

My Grade: 5.4 or D+