There are horror film, monster movies, and creature features with significant overlap between these three sub-genres and this week’s releaseCrawl pretty much falls into the Creature Feature definition.

Set in a fictional Florida town of Coral Lake during a category 5 hurricane, Crawl  is about Haley Keller (Kaya Scodelario) and her father Dave (Barry Pepper) trapped in the crawlspace of their home while being menaced by aggressive alligators. If you have seen the trailers for the film then you have pretty much seen the entire premise and set-up. Clocking in at a slim 86 minutes Crawl  doesn’t waste much time, very quickly delivering it’s central character Haley into the jaws of danger and then escalated the obstacles throughout the movie. Focused on the dangers of drowning and deadly alligators the movie is light on character development, though it has some just enough to hang the barest story upon, and any deeper theme beyond survival is wholly absent from the script. With the exception of a few secondary and utterly disposable characters this movies rest entirely upon Haley and Dave as they struggle to survive.

In a high-concept movie there is usually one ‘gimmie’ that is asked of the audience, one element that if accepted though it flies in the face of reality allows the rest of the story to unfold organically and with suspension of disbelief. In the classic film Jaws  one has to ignore actual shark behavior but beyond that the film proceeds logically. With this film the one gimmie should be the alligator behavior but sadly the writers and directors instead ask the audience to accept impossibility upon impossibility particularly as the movies crashes through its third act action. Detailed and graphic tissue damage that the characters, both Haley and Dave, sustain from attacks are minimized beyond belief for the sake of keeping the characters mobile, active, and capable of impressive physical feats for even uninjured persons. The first time the filmmakers ignored the realistic effect of a compound leg fracture, I simply groaned and accepted it, the second I silently growled in frustration, and by the climax I needed to stifle actual laughter.  In addition to the grossly under-valued physical damage the characters nearly ignore, the third act also suffers from contrived coincidences with valuable and critical equipment literally floating to the characters in their moment of dire need. As an additional note, a category 5 hurricane has sustained winds exceeding 157 miles per hour and there will not be rescue helicopters flights in such conditions.

Overall I found Crawlunworthy of the timer I spent watching it and I took solace in knowing that as part of my weekly three movies from the theater chain’s subscription service it cost me no extra money. For others, with less sensitive suspension of belief, this movie may turn out to be a fun roller coaster ride, an exciting summer popcorn movie, but for me it was not.