Hurricane season is coming, and Crawl will soon arrive to make sure that you heed those mandatory evacuation orders. Because not only do the characters in Alexandre Aja’s new horror movie battle high winds and flooding, there’s also some angry alligators swirling through the waters. They’re smashing windows and invading basements and clearly out to get humanity (one of the film’s taglines is “They Were Here First”), and with the director of High Tension, The Hills Have Eyes, Piranha 3D in charge, you know this won’t play out as joyously as last year’s Hurricane Heist. Not even close.
Produced by Sam Raimi (Evil Dead, Don’t Breathe) and Craig Flores (300), Crawl launches directly into high concept territory. A young woman (Kaya Scodelario) sets out to rescue her father (Barry Pepper) rather than get out the hell of town. This is very clearly the wrong decision, and she soon finds herself trapped within a flooding home with a pack of alligators that are dead set upon making her a corpse. I’m not quite sure how she’s surviving, given that she’s attacked twice in the trailer and keeps on going, but logic does not prevail when horror tropes exist.
Fortunately, Aja in the driver’s seat and the presence of Raimi and Flores virtually guarantee that this movie will deliver claustrophobic scares aplenty. Crawl slithers into theaters in July 12, right in the thick of hurricane season. Check out a menacing poster below.
