Editorials
‘Crawl’ and the Apex Bond Between Daughter and Father [Father’s Day]
Almost a full year after making waves at the box office, Alexandre Aja’s Crawl is now available to stream on Hulu and Prime Video. It’s just in time for Father’s Day. Considering the plot centers around a father and daughter trying to survive both a Category 5 hurricane and territorial alligators that have trapped them in a flooded house, it’s the ideal feature to watch with dad this weekend. That’s not a mere recommendation, but perhaps a hard suggestion. Nearly a year ago, I took my dad to see Crawl in theaters, and the father-daughter relationship in the film holds a more profound, different context now then it did then. One that I couldn’t have anticipated.
Crawl functions as a lean, mean thriller, delivering white-knuckle intensity and Aja’s trademark brand of brutal suspense. Its simplistic plot doesn’t offer much depth, but it doesn’t need to. Kaya Scodelario stars as Haley, a young woman that heads into a hurricane to retrieve her father, Dave (Barry Pepper). She barely has enough time to find him injured in the crawlspace underneath his house before the alligators trap them in place, and the hurricane’s rising floodwaters cause time to be of the essence. It’s a survival thriller heavy on intense action sequences, so not much time is wasted expanding the characters. The audience is given enough to know that Haley and Dave have been estranged, that Haley’s an avid, competitive swimmer once coached by dad, and that dad might be a bit isolated and depressed in the wake of family strife. Through their fight to make it out alive, daughter and dad realize what’s most important; each other.
It’s earnest, and perhaps overly sweet. Especially when dad encourages his daughter to fight, to channel her competitiveness into a will to survive, and it results in cheesy dialogue lines like Haley affirming, “Apex predator all day, baby!” Even in the theater, amidst the pulse-pounding thrills, that line reads silly. Between the high-octane thrills and the compelling performances by Scodelario and Pepper, though, these minor quibbles don’t ultimately detract from the film. Not enough to reduce enjoyment, anyway, at least not for me. It likely helped that it was easy to relate to Haley, at least in terms of the role reversal between a parent and their adult child. Dave may be her father, but Haley is the one parenting him for much of the runtime. At some point in your adult life, you start to recognize that same shift in the relationship dynamic. You slowly realize you’re the one making sure they’re doing well, that they’re healthy, and scolding if they’re not—all of which to say, that it was easy to connect with Haley.
My dad loved the movie. That jump scare where the tree crashes through the window? He jumped so high, and it’d take a lot to get a visible reaction out of him. He was on the edge of his seat during our theatrical experience and was downright giddy when the credits rolled. All of that was high praise coming from him, a stoic, retired Army veteran who usually conveyed that he liked a movie with, “it’s okay.” So, taking my dad to see a film featuring a grown daughter fight off alligators with her father, and for him to have an evident blast watching it, made for a personal movie highlight of the year.
Crawl wasn’t the last movie I’d take my dad to see, but it was the final one he thoroughly enjoyed. On Thanksgiving, he fell violently, extremely ill. A few short weeks later, a biopsy revealed he had stage four pancreatic cancer that caught us all off guard. By the beginning of this year, he was gone after a swift, ugly, and painful battle that I wouldn’t wish upon anyone.
What was once a fond memory of giving my dad a fun movie-going experience became something more meaningful with the realization that it was the last father-daughter outing untainted by cancer. The last time I got to see him enjoy himself without the immense physical pain that he would endure just a handful of months later. I’ll be forever grateful for that. It can be all too easy to write off the value of movies as escapism, but escapism can be crucial.
Crawl excels at what it set out to accomplish, which is to keep you breathless for its brisk runtime. An earnest father-daughter bond grounds it. One that I hadn’t given a whole lot of thought to initially until my own life experiences reframed it. On a thematic and personal level, Aja’s creature feature makes for the perfect movie to watch with dad on Father’s Day. There’s the familiar heartfelt relationship at the center, sure, but mostly Crawl ensures a good time. That’s what Father’s Day should be all about- making good memories with dad. Even if you don’t watch Crawl with dad, or your children for that matter, do something. Keep making memories while you can.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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