The new trailer for Alexandre Aja’s new film “Crawl” – produced by the legendary Sam Raimi – has dropped today and what a sneak peek it was!
Weighing in at precisely two minutes and thirteen seconds, this snippet showcases why the French Aja (The Hills Have Eyes) is one of the more exciting voices plying his trade in American horror movies at this particular moment; kudos, too, for Sam Raimi, no stranger to the horror genre, for recognizing this.
I first ran across Alexandre Aja while living in Texas when I caught a showing of his aptly named film High Tension (or Haute Tension for you French purists out there). While I was more intrigued by the setup of this movie versus the final execution – pun fully intended-, I remember walking out from the inky blackness of the movie theater into the blazing sun and thinking, ‘Boy, this is someone to keep an eye out for!’ There was just enough Alfred Hitchcock and George Sluizer in this man’s DNA that I wanted to be the first one in line for his next movie.
Sam Raimi, the producer of Crawl needs no elaborate introduction, but that will not stop your fearless prognosticator of film from making one at any rate: Striking new ground with his directorial calling card, The Evil Dead, he quickly went on to establish a trilogy of Dead movies even as he took extended sabbaticals to direct the more so-called mainstream movies such as Spider-Man and A Simple Plan (my personal fave). The man has never forgotten his horror roots however, as is evidenced by his establishment of his own horror production company, Ghost House Pictures, which, coincidence of coincidences makes for a great segue way to my next fearless paragraph…
With the gonzo trailer premiere of his new Ghost House Pictures film Crawl I feel as if we can genetically splice in a little bit of DNA from such people as Roger Corman (Attack of the Crab Monsters), Steven Spielberg (Jaws) and Renny Harlin (Deep Blue Sea). This is a good thing as the trailer as seen today takes itself seriously, but not too seriously, allowing itself a little elbow room to appeal to those movie fans who like their horror with a little bit of cheese on the side.
The plot is simple enough, perhaps deceptively so: A tremendous Category 5 hurricane hits the state of Florida, leaving a woman (played by the sublime Kaya Scodelaris of Wuthering Heights and Moon fame) trapped beneath a flooding house. You think you’re having a bad day? Scodelaris not only has to contend with biblical style flooding, she also has to go all Linda Hamilton T2 on a pack of bloodthirsty alligators, none too happy about being displaced in the aforementioned hurricane. Think Aliens meets The Alligator People. Or The River meets The Impossible if you’re more art house inclined.
Sam Raimi is onboard as a producer of this film thanks to his own Ghost House Pictures and one gets the sense from watching the trailer that he and Aja are in on the joke of some of the more improbable stuff happening in Crawl but never to the point where they’re making fun of their own work. In a Hollywood of 2019 that has been overrun by a continual torrent of superhero and computer animated flicks they may have pulled off the best special effect of all: They’re having fun bringing back unabashed cheese to multiplexes the world over. I’ll be in line on July 12 to laugh and scream along with them.
Vents MagaZine Music and Entertainment Magazine
