Crawl (2019)

Crawl is a horror movie about a Florida hurricane that I think was just intended to serve as propaganda for other people not to come to this already overpopulated state. It’s basically like what every other state thinks Florida’s hurricane seasons are always like. Right down to the gators happily devouring anybody that comes into their path. Hurricane seasons are like buffets for gators.

WARNING: A HURRICANE OF SPOILERS in this review!!

Director: Alexander Aja

Starring: Kaya Scodelario, Barry Pepper

IMDb

Co-written with Tony and Michelle.

The movie follows a woman, Haley, who has been competitive swimming her whole life who just can’t seem to quite win when it counts. She talks to her sister as this category 5 hurricane is barreling toward the state, and they can’t get in touch with their father. The movie throws in some exposition about how the family has been split up for years, because we won’t have time to delve into the rich complex drama of this family once the gator stuff starts up. And they add in a few jabs so we know they all still hate each other. Ah, family.

So Haley, possessing that classic Floridian insanity, decides to drive down I-75 to find her father, despite the sky looking like it actively wants to murder everyone – which, in Florida, is understandable. She sneaks into town against the cops’ warnings, and finds her dad in a weird crawlspace beneath his house, presumably built because this is the kind of hick nutjob character who is paranoid we’re going to have a nuclear war any day because of the liberal darkness in the country – but the movie doesn’t expound on this. Just me theorizing here.

Unfortunately for this poor sap, a bunch of gators have snuck in – the scamps! One of them bites Haley on the leg but she seems fine after, still able to run and swim perfectly fine. Must have been one of those gators with cotton balls for teeth. The dad has also already been maimed. I kept expecting him to die, but I guess he’s just too tough to do that when he has all that online dating and selling his house to move into a shitty condo like the movie shows us. He has so much to live for!

The movie unfolds into a pretty thrilling, fun ride as they try to avoid both the gators and the flooding from this monster storm. It’s a well constructed thriller. A lot of tense moments. Even if I’m skeptical of how many times they survive being bitten by gators. Shit, man. I guess gator bites aren’t so bad after all.

Several plot points in this thing revolve around Haley having to use her swimming talents, which her dad helped train into her from a young age. Every time this happens, her dad whispers something under his breath like “you go, honey!” Did he train her to swim specifically so he could feel good about himself? I hope he enjoyed the bragging rights from mercilessly beating a competitive sport into his own child. I’m also glad they chose a discipline that could help for the EXACT CIRCUMSTANCES of this movie’s plot. What kind of luck is that?

Also, they get in a few lines about their family drama in. The dad even takes time to talk about how life was so hard with his ex wife/Haley’s mom. It’s like yeah, but we’re still trapped in a flooding crawlspace with gators. I don’t think your ex wife can compare with this, buddy. It is nice that the gators are respectful and polite, letting them converse without interrupting. Gators truly are some of nature’s most considerate creatures.

There’s a lot of stuff that happens – mostly more gator attacks, including a thrilling scene where they try and brave a flooded area full of gators to get to a boat. Then the boat ships them back to the house they’d just come from. Whoops! It’s like you can never truly escape from where you came. Powerful stuff. Metaphoric, even.

Oh and there’s a scene where she shoots a gun like five times in a gator’s mouth. I thought that was cool.

Eventually they make it to the roof just in time for a helicopter, surveying the ruins with a sense of awe no doubt, to pick them up, flying them to safety so they can no doubt continue their familial arguing like earlier! Hooray for dysfunction!

But no, seriously. I wanted this to go even further. I wish they hadn’t been saved right away. I wanted to see where this post-apocalyptic wasteland could go. Maybe have the gators form some kind of union and gain human intelligence over time. Then, as the rule of law fades to distant memory and the post-hurricane humans have to co-exist with the gators, the humans could try and negotiate with the gators in order to survive and possibly escape back to civilization. That would be cool. I long for the day when a film will go this far!

Until then, this is a pretty fucking solid monster movie. It’s better than some others I’ve seen in the genre – I mean if you have a choice between this and, say, a Jaws sequel, then the choice should be clear enough. It’s well made and entertaining.

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Midsommar (2019)

Just a year after his breakout hit Hereditary, director Ari Aster is back with this movie, which is somewhat like a Wes Anderson-style comedy if Anderson descended into a serial-killer-style mania. There are gonna be spoilers in this one, so tread lightly.

Director: Ari Aster

Starring: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor

IMDb

Midsommar is about a bunch of kids going to Sweden for one of the guys, Josh, to do a thesis on European traditional ceremonies. Josh is played by William Jackson Harper of the Good Place, which is a fitting casting if I ever saw one. Also, the guy from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, the eccentric game developer, is in this too, as a womanizing idiot, so that was fun.

The central act is the relationship between Dani (Florence Pugh) and Christian (Jack Reynor), who are not really vibing with one another and he wants to break up with her. Unfortunately, an all too common occurrence happens when Dani’s mentally unstable sister kills herself and their parents with poisonous gas, thus making it inconvenient for Christian to break up with her. Bummer! It’s weird that the movie made the sister bipolar. That’s not a good message to send at all. But it did top the ‘child severed head’ scene from Hereditary that shocked the fuck out of me last year – god, it’s awful to watch.

So Dani, who the movie implies has always been somewhat anxious and needy, is now understandably traumatized and depressed. Pugh does an amazing job at conveying this character. Easily in the same class as Toni Collette from Hereditary – he’s got a knack for working with killer actresses and they all do amazing shit.

The movie unfolds at a pleasantly lackadaisical, molasses-slow pace that I think works for it. Most horror movies are like 85 minutes and barely waste any time getting to the point. That’s great when they’re good. This works because it takes its time and lets you immerse yourself in these strange, rolling green fields, these chipper white-clad Swedes in the countryside, the sort of glimmer of unease that grows as the movie goes on. Everything is shot open and wide, and it gives the movie a different feel than the pervasive shadows and quick cuts of other horror movies. The characters are goofy and not all of them given much development, but they’re acted well and seem believable as these chumps who wandered into a bizarre situation.

I think it’s strange that this is a 2019 movie using the old “look at how creepy these foreigners are!” trope. I really thought that had died off. But then again, nostalgia is big these days. There’s a scene where the villagers take two old people and have them jump off a cliff to their deaths and then when one of them survives, they take turns bludgeoning his face in with a giant mallet. They didn’t know this would be jarring to people from America or other countries? Pretty hard to believe. I mean if they’d had a demonstration where a cop shoots an unarmed black person, I could understand, but this is a bit much. It is a creepy scene though.

Also I take issue with the one Swedish guy, Pelle, who was their friend back in grad school in the US and hooked them up with the gig. He apparently was in on the whole thing and was a big part of the others getting killed or sucked into the cult lifestyle of this countryside coven. What was the plan there – he went across the ocean, enrolled in grad school, took classes and met friends with the sole, long-shot hope that he’d be able to find some guys who wanted to do a thesis on European Midsommar traditions so he could sacrifice them to his weird gods? Seems like that was a hard bargain. Glad he was able to do it. You can accomplish anything with determination and somewhat implausible writing! All of them end up dying – so I hope that grad school money this guy wasted was worth it, since he can’t go back now without facing questions about it!

But even with those misgivings, I was sucked in. I loved the surrealistic, rolling wave of this film, which just sucked me in like some 1950s Blob type abomination. The complete absence of any outside world was entrancing. The little details, like when Dani hallucinates her dead family in momentary glimpses, are like icing on the cake. God I love that type of shit in horror movies – the little details that creep up on you. The movie’s slow, weird pace makes it so that the scares come random and unpredictable. It’s a bizarre, circus-like experience, the daylight making things off-kilter, the benevolence of the Swedes being genuine at times but quick to turn against the characters, creating this really paranoid atmosphere.

The metaphor of the whole thing is the dissolution and death of the relationship. Every conversation Dani and Christian have is fraught with weight and trouble. They’re never quite at ease and always a bit out of sync. They never seem to have a moment where it isn’t a chore for them both to interact, it seems, and anybody looking at them would probably think they were about to break up. He stayed with her through the awful tragedy, but at his core he just isn’t into this anymore, not by the time they make it to Sweden for sure. He doesn’t consciously cheat on her but doesn’t stop himself either, when the villagers nominate him to fuck a teenage girl to impregnate her and carry on their lineage. Could’ve probably protested a little more, there, bud.

But Dani sees them through the door and that’s that. She’s distraught and can’t forgive him – the relationship is unceremoniously done, in an ugly manner, but one that’s all too common. No more bones about that.

The ending comes with no more ambiguity as they vote to sacrifice a bunch of people, mostly the foreign main characters, to their weird old gods (don’t let them hear me saying that though). They nominate Christian to be the one who they paralyze and put inside a hollowed-out bear carcass as they burn him alive. What a day! There’s a good shot at the end of everyone screaming and it’s about as good as this ever could’ve ended, I suppose. I like that they don’t even try to put on an appearance that this is anything but horrific anymore. So much for trying to appeal to the outsiders, I guess.

Midsommar is a weird movie. Not without its problems, but Aster is a killer talent of a director and there's enough good here to make it well worth seeing if you're a fan of this new wave of horror movies and aren't resigned to only the classics. At the least, it’s a hell of a tourist pamphlet for those wanting to visit Sweden!

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Boar (2017)

Movie titles can be confusing sometimes, as to what they’re about. Sometimes, you just don’t know for sure. For instance, this one is about a giant boar that murders people in the outback.

Director: Chris Sun

Starring: Nathan Jones, Bill Moseley, the fucking boar

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

Boar is an Australian horror film starring Australian power lifter and wrestler Nathan Jones, who wins the contest for the man I’d be most afraid of if he ever turned evil and decided to start murdering people. Seriously; dude’s the size of the fucking Incredible Hulk. Bill Moseley, of Texas Chainsaw and Devil’s Reject’s fame, also has a role, although this is perhaps the only movie he’s done where he isn’t a raging psychotic, so you’d be forgiven for not immediately recognizing the man.

But the real star is the boar, of course! He wastes no time at all doing what boars do best: stealthily rampaging through the night like a vampire and massacring unsuspecting tourists. Did you know that boars can basically just appear and disappear at will, like ninjas? They’re really hard to hear and see, even when they’re gigantic like the one in this movie.

The movie is essentially a slasher film where the killer is a boar. It’s like if Jason Voorhees was a boar, which was always my main issue with those movies. The story moves through a series of characters with rich and complex backstories. Like, there’s a guy and a girl in a tent fucking! And another guy and a girl telling scary stories in the woods and he tells her to shut the fuck up a few times! It’s rich stuff. Compelling narratives, you see.

There are some other things that happen, such as two crazy old guys who wander around talking about stuff and who smartly split up to go look for the boar. Splitting up is a tried and true tradition in horror movies, and anybody who’s anybody does it immediately. It’s the mark of the high-born in a horror movie. One of them even finds one of the girls who previously got gored by the boar. Instead of helping her, he kind of dawdles around as he looks for the boar, which kills him!

Man, this boar is way smarter than most of the people around here. I think that’s why it’s so angry. It’s so easy to kill these people that he’s just crying out for a real challenge. But alas, none come. The boar stands alone as the apex predator of the world. The most dangerous of all God’s unholy creations...

The movie isn’t just about boar killing though. It has depth. It’s got other stuff happening, like the day to day life of a regular Australian bar and its patrons. This tough chick working behind the bar gets to beat up a guy being a creep. Then later on there’s a long sequence of this old man going on and on about how he saw the boar at the bar, with nobody believing him. It takes up a lot of time. My theory is, this guy was terminally ill and just wanted for once in his life to act in a movie. So kudos to Boar for letting him really go for it!

Meanwhile Bill Moseley’s character and his daughter’s boyfriend wander around as Moseley tries to convince the boyfriend guy that marrying his daughter is gonna be tough and he really has to think about it. Moseley, who’s been married three times, says he’s the poster child for what not to do. Man, who knew a movie called Boar would be raising some serious and deep questions about the nature of relationships. Like, are we ever really ready to get married? Are we prone as a species to rushing things, sadomasochistically running headlong into pain, knowing we’re only likely to end up disappointed? All questions the movie wants us to consider here. Very deep stuff.

That all comes to an end, though, when they come across the boar! They’re probably the only characters in this whole fucking movie to actually see this thing. That still doesn’t stop it from ripping off Moseley’s head like he’s a rag doll. Oh well, at least the boyfriend doesn’t have to worry about Moseley being up his ass about the marriage thing anymore!

Well, actually he too only survives a few more minutes. He comes back to the family and tries to tell them what happened, only then the boar lunges out from nowhere and gores him too. IT WAS BROAD DAYLIGHT. Even pre-schoolers would be able to see a giant murderous boar hurtling toward them. Blind people would at least hear it and be like, oh damn, I better move out of the way. Don’t give me any excuses like ‘oh, the characters here were on vacation, their guard was down’ - they should’ve seen the fucking thing!

I guess what happens next is a lot of running around in the dark. Nathan Jones’ character Bernie is able to fight the boar until it gores him and leaves him for dead, though because his body is apparently immortal Superman-like stuff, he survives and comes back later. The boar is actually killed by the chick from the bar from earlier. I guess bartenders really are the most badass people in society. She can kick the asses of random weirdos trying to grope her in the bar, and also murderous boars. Do not fuck with the bartenders!

Well that was Boar. It had a little bit of everything, from horrific violence to charming family tales and even some moral dilemmas. All in all, a well-rounded movie for the discerning film goer. Check it out!

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