Film
Banderas is touching, but
this film is a hollow effort
An utterly absurd creature feature
E
ven before the levees break
during a savage Florida
hurricane in Crawl, the ’gators
are out to lunch, gnashing their way
around a grimy basement where a
father and daughter find themselves
imprisoned. “We are going to beat
these pea-brained lizard sh--s!”,
bellows Barry Pepper’s injured dad to
Haley (Kaya Scodelario), a college
swimming champ who has come to the
most dangerous corner of the
floodplain to save him.
These two set about pitting human
brains against reptile ones to save their
own bacon – and if a truly excellent
version of Crawl is even to be
imagined, it would probably need to
riff on this difference in native
intelligence and satisfy immensely as a
battle of wits.
Battle of what, you say? Crawl,
directed by the French horror
specialist Alexandre Aja (Haute
Tension, Piranha 3D) is no such
version, mounted though it may be
with a showman’s attention-grabbing
virtuosity from first to last. While the
storm – category 5 – wreaks its
impressive computerised deluge
outside, the CGI alligators come offswimmingly, too. They bulge and
thrash, more numerous than we first
realise, and swish around at any
vibrations in the water, with some
near-miss chomps and then some that
find their meat. Before long, Pepper
and Scodelario, trying to tag-team
their way through this crisis, are both
applying tourniquets in agony and
plotting their next hobbled move.
It goes without saying that Haley’s
freestyle abilities will come in handy
when there’s distance to be covered at
pace. Outside, none of the other saps
who try to outswim these apex
predators stands a chance. There’s a
daft section where she spies three
unsuspecting kids across the street in
the process of looting a gas station.
When she tries to flash her torch for
help, the ’gators close in at that exact
moment for a lavish feeding frenzy.
Aja knows how to exploit screen
space to build suspense and get youwith a well-timed sting. He draws
mainly effective, slightly shaky work
from both his leads. He also can’t help
but imitate James Cameron to within
an inch of his life. There’s a last-ditch
CPR scene straight out of The Abyss,
and an alligators’ egg lair into which
Haley slithers like Sigourney Weaver
finding the “nest” in Aliens.
It’s utterly absurd and a different
category of fun. The film lifts when
we’re not having to go through the
motions of a boring father-daughter
relationship that’s pure processed
cheese. Only when it reaches for
all-out camp does this script truly
tickle the pleasure receptors. You fear
for how many limbs Pepper will have
left, the next time he points his
daughter across infested floodwater
with a quick pep talk and a yell of
“SWIM!”. Crawl isn’t Jaws, any day of
the week, but it’s crunchy Friday-night
nonsense that knows what it’s doing.Not Jaws: Barry Pepper and Kaya Scodelario getting terrorised by alligatorsP
lucked from a series of short
stories by the American writer
Alvin Schwartz, which were first
published under that title in 1981,
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is a pick
‘n’ mix of nightmarish tales.
Though intended for children,
supposedly aged eight to 12, they
became rather notorious because of
the illustrations by Stephen Gammell- legitimately skin-crawling, wispy
drawings with a ghoulish
suggestiveness and sick grandeur. A
red spot, on the face of a girl named
Ruth, explodes open into a black,
spider-infested crater, for instance.
The prim Victorian-Gothic horrors
of Edward Gorey had nothing on
these. Come a new 2011 edition,
parental complaints had reached such
a peak that the books were re-
illustrated blandly by someone else.
Guillermo del Toro has been
inspired – as much by Gammell’s
creepy artwork, by the looks of things,
as Schwartz’s text – to produce and
co-write this adaptation, which strings
together a few of the most infamous
yarns with a linking story about
suburban teens exploring a local
legend. The idea isn’t far off George A
Romero’s fantastic Creepshow (1982), or
one of the Amicus-produced
anthology horrors from the Seventies.
In fact, if the film had fully embraced
its episodic quality, it might have paid
off in exactly that way.
Norwegian director André Øvedal
(Troll Hunter, The Autopsy of Jane Doe)
certainly has form with the uncanny,
and del Toro’s has a knack for
showcasing effects coups that are hard
to imagine in the pre-CGI age: a ghoul
reassembling itself from tumbled body
parts, say, or a scarecrow with no
midriff coming to life. The set pieces
score nicely, at least when they’re
paying attention: an undeniably gross
tale called The Big Toe, involving a
polluted stew that suddenly
materialises in someone’s fridge, is
awkward and implausibly handled.
The promising Zoe Colletti (as a
budding genre writer), strikes up an
appealing puppy-love rapport with
Ramón (Michael Garza), a dreamy
draft-dodger passing through town.
But the thrown-together finale in a
haunted mansion is a bit of a mess,
feebly cross-cutting between this pair.
It’s left to the design team, once again,
to come to the rescue, laying on spectral
flourishes in the cobwebby dungeon
where an old-fashioned family once
locked up their hapless daughter.
Most effective of all the visitations- and the one lifted reverentially from
one of Gammell’s weirdest drawings –
is a pale-faced lady, shuffling along
like one of the bloated demons from
Hellraiser, who lurks in the corridors
of an old lunatic asylum and pops up
everywhere you turn.
Chillingly achieved without CGI,
she’ll be the dominant talking point
for the older-teen demographic here - except for extreme arachnophobes
or those terrified of a boil breaking
out. Scary Stories hits with the scares
as much as it misses with the
storytelling, levelling out to a glass
half full.
Too much story and
not enough scares
A
t 69, Pedro Almodóvar is
in career-recap mode, and
has dipped his toes into
self-reflexive nostalgia far
later than Federico
Fellini, a mere pup at 43
when he made 8½. Pain and Glory
centres on a filmmaker named
Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas),
whose greatest works are behind him,
and who’s resting on his laurels, at
least as far as he can: he has chronic
back pain after surgery for fused
vertebrae, and the spinal scars to
prove it.
Unlike Almodóvar himself, who has
consistently knocked out a film every
two or three years, Salvador is in the
throes of classic cinematic writer’s
block, equating him more with
Mastroianni’s character in the Fellini
film. It’s the kind of predicament most
likely to be cured by a regular dose of
rose-tinted flashbacks, returning us to
a childhood of no fixed abode, with a
hard-working mother (Penélope Cruz)umpteenth festival invite. The
problem with Salvador, who next gets
to work on something cringeworthily
entitled The First Desire, is that his
outlook on life, art, everything, seems
so much dimmer, and weirdly vainer,
than Almodóvar’s own.
Where the director’s finest films
make leaps of empathy in all sorts of
surprising directions, this is the
portrait of an artist as someone
wrapped up only in himself.
And while the rueful, rumpled
Banderas does well to rescue the guy
from being altogether poor company,
the film is an uneven dabble in sense
memory, with a clever last shot that
redeems things slightly, but can’t
altogether save it.Pain and Glory
15 Cert, 112 min★★★★★
Dir Pedro Almodóvar
Starring Antonio Banderas, Asier
Etxeandia, Penélope Cruz, Julieta
Serrano, Cecilia Roth, Leonardo
SbaragliaTim Robey
FILM CRITICTime for reflection: Asier Etxeandia and
Antonio Banderas, above Danger zone:
Charlie ‘Chuck’
Steinberg (Austin
Zajur) is in for
the fright
of his lifeCrawl
15 Cert, 87 min★★★★★
Dir Alexandre Aja
Starring Kaya Scodelario, Barry
Pepper, Ross Anderson, Morfydd
ClarkBy Tim RobeyScary Stories to Tell
in the Dark
15 Cert, 107 min★★★★★
Dir André Øvredal
Starring Zoe Colletti, Michael Garza,
Austin Zajur, Gabriel Rush, Dean
Norris, Gil BellowsBy Tim RobeyFilm Newsletter
For more movie news and reviews, you
can sign up to Robbie Collin’s weekly
film newsletter by visiting
telegraph.co.uk/filmnewsletterwhom Salvador blames for packing
him off to seminary school.
Meanwhile, a film he made 30 years
ago pops back into his agenda, when
he’s invited to present a new
restoration, despite all his troubles
with the shoot back then: after
disagreeing with the lead actor,
Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia),
about his interpretation of a manic
cokehead, they’ve been estranged
ever since. A rapprochement is on the
cards, effected by Salvador when he
turns up uninvited on Alberto’s
doorstep to discover the actor’s dirty
secret – he has become a high-
functioning heroin addict, lowering
the dose only when he has creative
reasons to get out of bed.
Drug-taking, as an escape and an
excuse to give in, is a major subject
here, from the moment that Salvador
experimentally takes a toke off foil in
Alberto’s garden, finding the high a far
stronger analgesic than his own meds,
along with a powerful ability to access
his memory banks.
These flashbacks, peopled by
several actors even more absurdly
beautiful than Cruz, could only be
chemically induced: there’s a stupidly
hot decorator, for instance, whose
naked body glimpsed after a wash
counts as Salvador’s first sexual
experience. For some portion of his
childhood, he recalls living with Cruz’s
Jacinta in the cave where this all
happens, but – this being Almodóvar’s
kind of cave – it’s one you’d write
glowingly about on TripAdvisor for
the sheer art direction.
The walls of Salvador’s
contemporary apartment are a shrine
to his avant-garde taste, of course, andAlberto’s lair is a bohemian paradise.
But Almodóvar’s decorative largesse
overwhelms his good sense: he can’t
even shoot a scene in a radiology clinic
without shiny representations of joint
trauma all over the walls.
The film often rings hollow. When
Salvador convinces Alberto to perform
an old monologue about the torment
of his relationship with a heroin-using
boyfriend, the text of this misery
memoir is meant to be devastatingly
frank, but it’s more like a confessional
out of The Only Way is Essex.
At least it unlocks the film’s best
scene, a late-in-life reunion between
those two old partners, with Leonardo
Sbaraglia stealing supporting honours
as the long-lost ex checking in for old
times’ sake.
Almodóvar’s writing, banal in other
parts, lifts immensely as the pair
search out each other’s trajectories
since they said goodbye, and Banderas
– who gives an impressively honest
and touching performance – finally
has some proper emotional history to
play off. There are moments of wit
dotted through: “I don’t know why
they think so much of me in Iceland,”
the director ponders on receiving hisThe Daily Telegraph Friday 23 August 2019 *** 27
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