Written By Shawn Francis
CRAWLSPACE
is, at its core, a mystery, so for all those who don’t want to know
anything about the movie, I recommend not reading this review. I will
try and keep spoilers at a minimum, but it’s a hard flick to talk
about without revealing something, and since I ended up liking it a
lot, it’s inevitable that things that shouldn’t be talked about
will get talked about. I will endeavor to keep spoilers in the
general category rather than going into specific detail, but—isn’t
there always a but—I can’t guarantee that will happen.
Have you ever watched a movie that started out okay, or worse, and
stayed that way, until the very end when it suddenly hits you over
the head with an interesting conclusion, which ends up making
everything you just saw prior much better? CRAWLSPACE is that
movie, an okay one, a not bad one, a time killer, until twenty to
thirty minutes before it’s over when more about the mystery is
finally revealed. And it’s not so much the details, which are no
doubt compelling, but it’s how those details were presented
that really won me over. I’ll try to explain in more vague
detail later on.
I
remember hearing about this movie some months ago, but ignored it
because it said it was executive produced by the director of WOLF
CREEK (2005). I have nothing against Greg Mclean, he made one of
the best nature run amok movies about a giant crocodile, but I’m
not a big fan of torture porn or movies about psychos killing people
diabolically on a regular basis, and since this first news referenced
Mclean’s slasher flick instead of ROGUE (2007), and with a
title like, CRAWLSPACE, I naturally assumed it was another
slasher movie, thus I ignored the article and all subsequent ones
that followed.
I
didn’t get my interest piqued until the trailer came out and I
decided one day to just have a quick peek and see what this thing was
all about. Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised to see it had
nothing at all to do with serial killers in the outback, or anywhere
else in the world, for that matter. It was better than that. Weirder
than that, too, and I liked the look of it. I made it a point, when
the time came, to see if I could get a review copy or a screener.
I
ended up managing to get a screener from IFC Films, but before it
ever arrived a clip of the movie was released that pretty much
chronicled the gruesome death of a character via one of those little
circular saws used to cut through the skull during brain operations.
It’s a nasty demise and the agonizing cries the guy made actually
managed to disturb me. Watching it with the sound muted didn’t
bother me, which led me to an interesting observation to how
important sound is to movies. Anyhow, after seeing that clip I had
second thoughts about wanting to see this movie, and thought, well,
maybe, IFC will somehow forget about my query and not send the
screener, which has happened on a number of occasions with
other distributors. No sooner did I think that than I get a knock at
the door. It was FedEx with a package, most likely a review copy, but
of what movie? I opened it and lo and behold it’s IFC’s screener
of CRAWLSPACE. No joke. Well, looks like I’m committed now.
Thankfully, that
clip is really the only truly gruesome death in the movie, at
least, as it applies to the agonizing wails of any of the victims.
In 1966 the Australian and U.S. Governments established Pine Gap,
a top-secret research facility in the remote Australian outback.
15 hours ago all contact with the facility was lost,
cause unknown . . .
These
are the first words that flash across the screen, after that the
mystery of CRAWLSPACE begins . . . we are introduced to a
woman (Amber Clayton) who is slowly coming to in an ominous corridor
that screams underground base. There is a bracelet on her wrist with
the words EVE on it, we also see half her head is shaved and
decorated with the aftereffects of what might possibly be some kind
of cranial surgery. Things get worse when she gazes to her right and
finds mangled and mutilated bodies, I mean, so much so that if you
got it into your head to try CPR, first you’d have to find a pair
of lips, and there’s nothing that even looks like a pair of
lips within the biological mess this “Eve” is looking at.
Get
my drift?
So,
what we can glean from these opening scenes is that something
horrendous happened at Pine Gap, not just to the people around this
“Eve,” but to “Eve” herself and later on we learn she has no
memory of how she got to Pine Gap, why she was operated on, or even
who the hell she is.
The
next characters we are introduced to are a bunch of military types
being transported in to via helicopter. The man in charge is telling
his men that prisoners have gotten loose within the facility and
their job is to shoot them dead on site, and rescue any research
personnel. Got it. We now see one of our other main characters, Romeo
(Ditch Davey), looking at a series of photos of the people he has to
kill and one of them is this “Eve.”
The
mystery deepens.
It’s
safe to say once the men have finally gotten deep inside the base
things turn “complicated,” and that’s putting it mildly. For
starters when Romeo finally discovers Eve he quickly comes to the
conclusion he can’t kill her. Why? Well, this chick is the girl he
was going to propose to some time ago, but a tragic accident ended
all that. She’s supposed to be dead. Drowned, from what we see from
his memories of her. So, what is she doing here, and why would he be
sent on a kill mission where one of the targets is someone he’s
intimately known, who he already believes to be dead in the first
place?
Things
quickly go from worse to really fucking worse when the team is set
upon by some kind of “creature.” Never totally seen, but from
what we can glean of it, we can quickly ascertain it probably belongs
to the ape family, gorilla to be precise, but what kind of gorilla
can sustain gunfire from a semi-automatic weapon? None that I know
of, unless one has recently been unearthed and we haven’t been told
about it. Facial features seem to be ape-like but there’s something
about them that are also not ape-like either. And are those
bandages wrapped around its arms? We get no answers here for the
“ape” is blown up.
Slowly
we learn that during “Eve’s” operation something happened that
allowed all the test subjects/prisoners, and apparently, the test
animals, to escape. This is as far as I can go, but this is basically
the set-up to the movie.
I
read several reviews prior to acquiring IFC’s screener and one
likened the movie to CUBE (1997), ALIENS (1986) and SCANNERS
(1981). I will agree when it comes to ALIENS and SCANNERS,
but not so much with CUBE. If anything it reminds me of
RESIDENT EVIL (2004) where Alice wakes and has no idea who she
is, and as the movie goes along we learn more and more of what she
has forgotten. Same here thing applies here. And as much of an ALIENS
homage we see playing out, it’s the SCANNERS vibe that ends
up being the lynch pin to the mystery.
As
you can tell the movie is a stew of concepts we all have seen before
to greater and/or lesser extent in other movies, but Director/FX
Artist, Justin Dix’s take is notable for reconfiguring them so all
that is essentially old seems new again, or, at the very least, seen
from a new angle.
Now,
I must discus what really sold me on the movie—the “final
battle.” But it wasn’t a battle of fisticuffs, or guns, but a
psychic one, and not even the kind of psychic combat you’d see in
Cronenberg’s movie. There are four people left near the end, two of
them are gifted with this movie’s “scanner-like” abilities. The
two that are not gifted are engaged in revealing and coming to
grips, respectively, with what is really happening around them. Laced
within that almost casual conversation is the “psychic fight,”
and I didn’t even realize it until the “fight” was in
mid-swing. Very well done and very in keeping with what this Dr.
Caesar has been trying to perfect at this base.
I
was able to locate director, Justin Dix, on Facebook, and ask him a
few questions regarding the movie. Incidentally, for those who have
never heard of Dix, he’s first and foremost a special effects
artist from Australia, an award winning one, I should add,
specializing in practical FX, and this movie is his first directorial
effort.
Not
being able to detect any obvious CGI enhancement—good news, the
copious blood is all-practical—I was curious if he ended up using
any and he told me: “There
is very little CGI in the movie as I'm all about practical if
possible, but as a low you are sometimes forced to go down that
route. The only CGI in the film really is the choppers going over the
fence and towards the base and the end shot at the end where the base
blows up.”
Since
I was extremely taken with this flick, after seeing how it all
concluded, my next logical question was if there might be a sequel in
the works, and here’s what he said: “I
imagine there will not be a sequel of this version, what I mean about
that is that we have had some talks with a few people about a US
re-make.”
I
asked him next what, if any, projects he might have coming up: “I
have
written several scripts already but the first of these to move
forward is called 'Declassified' again, it's claustrophobic military
spooky.”
And,
finally, since you guys in the UK are getting this movie first on
blu-ray and DVD, and since I couldn’t find any mention at all about
any extra features it might have, I figured I’d ask Justin to see
if he knew: “The
film just came out in the US on the 4th Jan, on VOD and limited
theatrical. We have done a great making of and a commentary and
delivered these but I can't control if these will be on the Blu-ray's
or DVD's.”
The
movie’s aspect ratio is 2.35:1, and in IFC’s screener form, it
looked great. Many thanks to Justin Dix for contributing his replies
to this review and I urge all within the sound of my voice, or
reading this review, especially those who decided to brave it,
spoilers be damned, to seek out CRAWLSPACE.
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