“Crawlers” basically blends “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” horror with the story of a group of young people on St. Patrick’s Day navigating the social and physical pitfalls of an epic pub crawl. Shauna (the fun Giorgia Whigham), a girl who thinks she’s smarter than everyone in town (and she might be right), narrates “Crawlers” from a storytelling device that the film didn’t really need: what looks like a YouTube channel or vlog about that “one crazy night.” Whigham does the most with the structure, but Shauna doesn’t need to be stopping this story to over-explain it every now and then. It almost feels like a producer’s note that should have been dismissed.
The heart of the story belongs to Misty (Pepi Sonuga), a girl who recently went through something traumatic at a frat house and feels like she has been ignored by her best friend Chloe (Jude Demorest), who may be about to go off with one of those horrible dude bros, a guy named Aaron. (There’s a definite undercurrent of “Believe All Women” in “Crawlers,” whether they’re telling you about what happened at a frat party or that aliens are taking over your town.) When Chloe literally disappears, and Aaron was the last person she was seen with, Misty heads out to find her, trailed by a new girl named Yuejin (Olivia Liang).
“Crawlers” effectively balances its characters with a campier approach to horror that reminded me of ‘80s cult classics like “Night of the Comet,” which feels like a definite influence here. And the young cast helps elevate material that doesn’t rely too heavily on its gender-issue subtext but also doesn’t ignore it. Several of these “Into the Dark” movies have been imbalanced in that regard, leaning too hard into their high concepts and forgetting to be entertaining, or feeling hollow with nothing to say. I liked the balance of the two here, the story of female friendship with the action of a horror movie about the end of the world.
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