31 Days of Halloween: Crawl

Starting in 2011 we (Marmy and I, as Kent is not much of a horror fan) celebrated the Halloween season (when candies hit the stores) by watching too many horror / Halloween related movies, most of them bad.  2012 had a few flicks but not the full month. Un/Re-employment kill 2013. Apathy killed 2014. But we returned in 2015 with a full run. 2016 had a good start, but stalled in the last few days, likely due to work life. 2017 almost started with a fizzle, but then I remembered, "It's October 1st !"  It still fizzled out. Life abounds. And in 2018, almost the entire year was Halloween *ahem* as in the year of posting was mostly October.

This year I found myself looking forward to it. Oh, there will be interruptions and apathy and a trip to Las Vegas, but we held back from watching a number of lauded horror movies from the year, just so we could do THIS.

2019, Alexandre Aya (The Hills Have Eyes) -- download

Creature Feature. Monster movie. Pit some hapless main characters against something otherworldly or just something natural that acts with preternatural malice. We always attribute predators with malice. Sharks are evil. Wolves are stalkers. Piranha are alien eating machines. Cats sit on your chest at 5am and devour your soul. But they are just animals doing what animals do best -- eat another animal.

Alexandre Aja is mostly known for his remake of the Wes Craven classic The Hills Have Eyes but he also did the less-than-horror adaptation of the Joe Hill's (or Joe King if you prefer) dark fantasy novel Horns. He also did ... *ahem* ... Piranha 3D.  I am tempted to add his original French flick Haute Tension which garnered a lot of praise the year it played in TIFF Midnight Madness. An example of the so-called French Extremity Movement in film, it might just be outside our wheelhouse.

This is an example of how to do a solid horror/tension movie, if not that inventive. While I cannot say it was great, to any degree, it had a decent story, good scares and nicely structured acts. It mostly takes place in the titular crawlspace beneath a family home as a Florida hurricane comes barreling in. A prime example of something greenlit because of our current climate reality.

Haley (Kaya Scodelario; the Maze Runner movies) goes back to  the broken family home to find out where dad (Barry Pepper; Battlefield Earth) is. She is a competitive swimmer and he is the dad who drove her too hard. But... water, gators, SWIMMER ! After playing some cat & mouse with many many gators, and the horrid loss of some people who attempt to help the pair, the two escape to the roof of their house to await rescue. They leave behind most of the gators to eat anyone else who happens along.