Sometimes I do it like this: I go to a certain Swedish online store which specializes in movies, I go to advanced search, choose - for example - the distributor Take One, check the blu-ray opinion, search and then sort them by latest releases. I find a lot of interesting, new genre films that what. Some of them suck, some of them I love no matter what (The Asylum for example) and some of them is a total surprise. When I saw the title Crawl or Die I knew I had to check it out, something I never heard of before and it used words like tunnels, claustrophobia and creatures in the description. Nothing beats that, friends. So I ordered it, wait for a day extra or so because the Swedish postal service often sucks and then it arrived.
Was it worth the wait? Hell yeah.
Tank (Nicole Alonso) and her team is hired to move the last fertile woman on the planet to a safe place on a second earth, prepared to receive the humans and start a new life far from our old world, who slowly succumbs to a deadly virus. The new planet has code blue, which means it’s clean, it should be safe and free for humans to roam - but when we meet our heroes and “package”, the woman, for the first time, they’re involved in a furious escape through the alien wilderness. Soon they find a solution, to dig themselves underground to the tunnel system built by the first settlers, but whatever following them won’t give up so easy. Soon they’re trapped in a maze of increasingly narrow tunnels with something very hungry behind them!
Crawl or Die is an intensive ride and it’s one of the most ambitious and passionate micro budget movies I’ve seen in recent years. I’ve always said that it’s better you do it like you want it even if the budget won’t last, instead of trying to cut down your own ideas and make the result lame and bland. Somehow I think director Oklahoma Ward and producer/star Nicole Alonso had the same idea. It IS a cheap movie. It’s very cheap actually, and doubt it didn’t cost many dollars to make - especially considering the ambitious concept. The tunnels and sets are made of what looks like big cardboard pipes - those used in paper factories and the rest is plywood or some other cheap wooden material - sometimes not even painted. You can see how it’s put together, you can see how the walls sometimes are wobbling from the pressure of the actors crawling in and around them.
So be it, that’s the thing with micro budget. Sometimes not everything looks perfect. Just remember carrot man in Howard Hawks The Thing From Another World... didn't look that impressive, eh? Still a timeless classic according to everyone and their mothers!
But what Crawl or Die offers instead is a damn tight script, excellent directing and creative photography. There’s not a boring second here and they’ve managed to create a very claustrophobic movie with so many tight locations I found myself sweating because I, also an actor sometimes, would probably never handle acting in that environment, even if I knew there’s just a centimeter or two to freedom. I mean, the movie looks fantastic considering the lack of money! It’s dark, it’s brooding, there’s darkness in front and behind the actors, black holes where something could be hiding and jump out at you.
I also found myself genuinely surprised by the story sometimes, which not always followed the rules. Nicole Alonso is a very gifted actress and she carries the whole movie on her back without any problems. She’s up there together with Alien’s Sigourney Weaver and the cast of Neil Marshall’s The Descent. And yes, Crawl or Die uses some ideas from both of those movies, making it partly a good old Alien-rip off mixed with the nastiness of The Descent with a dash of Pandorum and Riddick. Only good movies, so I don’t mind.
Crawl or Die is gritty, violent, intensive and cheap - it’s ambitious and talented and I like it so much. A surprise, to say the least, and I hope the sequel(s) happens sooner than later, because the world needs some more badass monster-kicking! And I hope Ward and Alonso won’t skip the claustrophobia next time either, it what makes this future franchise so awesome.
In Sweden it’s out on a nice looking blu-ray from Take One. Not expensive and easy to find! Go get it!
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