How well do you know the people in your apartment building? Could you identify them, let alone carry a conversation with them, under normal circumstances? And how would a killer spider invasion affect your rapport with, say, Bradley the obnoxious social media personality (Gregg Sulkin) or Lady Lash (Melina Matthews), the ingratiating dominatrix down the hall? Oh, so now you want to focus on the killer spider part of this strictly hypothetical thought experiment? Very well then.
The fitfully creepy monster siege pic “Crawlers” takes a while to get to the stars of its high-concept premise: venomous Hero Spiders that devour the 20-unit Paradiso Palms apartment building. About a half hour, to be approximate. And to be fair, there are some creepy makeup and creature effects before and afterward, particularly in the disgusting prefatory image of a dead man’s festering shoulder wound, which leaks a gnarly-looking and spider-rich fluid.
Later on, there are even two or three genuinely crowd-pleasing scenes, one of which doesn’t involve arachnids. Unfortunately, the rest of “Crawlers” focuses on its human protagonists, and while they, too, have their moments, they’re not half as compelling as the titular invasive species.
Like last year’s “Infested,” “Crawlers” tries to win viewers’ sympathy through a vaguely defined kind of solidarity. There’s also a main heroine to latch onto, the Paradiso Palms’ beleaguered live-in manager Serena (Matilda Lutz), and a doggedly unlikable villain, the building’s landlord Mr. Rossmore (William Miller).
But for the most part, “Crawlers” struggles to weave a web of wispy interpersonal connections between Serena and Mr. Rossmore’s tenants, many of whom are barely stock types. Bradley, for example, apparently deserves the fate he inevitably faces, but who can really tell from one lamentably hacky scene where he shoots paintballs at a wall mural to gas up his easily amused live-stream followers? At least Lady Lash offers some stale banter in her scenes with Serena. Everybody’s still way more interesting when they’re either running away from or simply reacting to a comically large infestation.
Serena’s personality isn’t much more interesting, and it’s probably revealing that a mushy pair of establishing scenes that focus on her artistic ambitions—she’s got a guitar accessorized with a sticker that reads, “Music will save you!”—only winds up setting up a dumb but amusing payoff later on. Before then, Serena struggles to be taken seriously by almost everybody—not Lady Lash—since, in the eyes of her fellow residents, she’s just the janitor.
Serena’s neighbors ostensibly learn their lesson once the Hero Spiders break out of loner professor George’s (Chris Rogers) shoulder and into their homes. Unfortunately, director Ángel Gómez Hernández and his team don’t develop their characters’ humanizing qualities, so it’s hard to say any of them matter beyond a few spikes of generic peril.
Most of “Crawlers”’ supporting roles are defined by a rote cynicism that ultimately applies to both Serena and Mr. Rossmore. You might argue that everybody looks small and frustrated in the face of spider-related trauma, especially once the cops and also the Infectious Disease Center get involved.
That said, most dialogue scenes in this movie, including those led by Serena, feel trite and schematic, as if they were designed to tick boxes that satisfy certain dramatic prerequisites. Some characters are meant to be soft targets for us to roll our eyes at, but they’re so hatefully caricatured that one wonders why so much time is wasted shooting at fish in a barrel already overrun with spiders.
“Crawlers” only really comes alive when Hernández focuses on expressing their de rigueur misanthropy through visually composed, mostly thrilling scare scenes. Keep an eye out for a tense, memorably funny bit later on involving a sleeping tenant who almost swallows a spider while listening to some dopey self-help affirmations. Unfortunately, that scene gets split into two parts, and the back half only diminishes the sting of watching somebody listen to reassuring mantras like, “I am safe” and “I am protected” right before they’re attacked in bed.
Most high-concept horror movies like “Crawlers” fail to stay in the right lane when it comes to tone. The filmmakers bob and weave as they try to be alternately personable and mean, but it only makes the sadistic bits look better, and the up-with-people stuff look much worse.
Maybe the problem with a movie like this isn’t that its creators are especially bad at championing people, but rather that they seem to think we need a light touch in a squirm-inducing spider picture. In theory, a well-balanced horror adventure sounds great, but the best bits suggest that its creators really hobbled themselves by trying to be all things to all people.
