Maybe I’ve been brainwashed by the Christmas spirit, but when I first saw that poster, I could’ve sworn that Crawlspace was going to be a Christmas movie. It’s got things that look lit up, lots of green and red, and it even looks like ornaments are dangling! Also, people typically leave their Christmas decorations IN a crawlspace, right? I wouldn’t know, we just have a fake tree that is kept in MY closet, along with a lot of my toys. That’s right, a lot of my toys are in a closet instead of on display. Bullshit, right? I suppose that had I read the press release ahead of time, I would’ve known it had nothing to do with Christmas, but considering how much trailers give away these days, I tried to know as little about this movie as possible. Does that make me a bad reviewer? Probably, but so do countless other things I do. I’m awful. Why are you listening to me?! I got a little nervous with this Australian movie because the last two horror movies I saw that were made in Australia had human on dog violence, so I was a little nervous I’d be subjected to that again. Especially since there is dialogue in those first five minutes about dogs, I expected terrible things to happen in the first five minutes. Luckily, they used dog conversation to make a joke about pussy, so the crisis was averted. Phew, that was close!

She’s no Luke Skywalker or anything, but I’ve seen uglier people crawl around Cloud City.

There’s been a top secret military base running in Australia since 1966, but 15 hours ago, the rest of the Australian military lost contact with it. This means a military squad is sent in to figure out what’s going on, and shortly after their arrival, they realize some weird experiments have been going on down there. Knowing that there are escaped, dangerous inmates in this facility, they take a “shoot on sight” approach, until the one in charge, Romeo (Ditch Davey), recognizes one of the inmates (Amber Clayton) as a former love of his. This is confusing for SO many reasons, with the big one being that she’s not alive. Things get even weirder at the discovery of, and attack by, a giant gorilla monster thing. Eventually the military squad finds some of the crew responsible for what was going on at this base, and under their confidentiality orders, they don’t reveal everything that’s going on. The rest of the film reveals that there is some telekinetic experiments going on, and maybe some of the things they believe to be true aren’t really happening. This presents the audience, and the characters in the movie, to question who the real threat it, could this inmate possibly be a revived love interest, and what sacrifices should be made for the greater good.

SORRY BRO, THE BEARD RAVE IS IN THE OTHER VENTILATION SHAFT.

Oh, you want to know why this movie’s called “Crawlspace?” Well, a lot of it takes place in the tunnels of this top secret facility. Other than that, spaces only big enough to crawl through doesn’t really add to the tension of the film that much. I guess that earlier on, when you think maybe what’s supposed to be scary is creatures running around the titular crawlspaces might’ve made sense, but once we learned that it was mental powers, I didn’t see a reason why this movie had to take place in air ducts. I’m glad the movie went in a different direction, because early on it just felt like a poor imitation of some of the best scenes in the Alien franchise. Despite being glad it went in a different direction, it was a direction I still wasn’t really interested in. Movies that involve telekinesis just don’t really do much for me, because it’s kind of a grey area when it comes down to what the limitations or possible flaws of the “villain” might be. A lot of the deaths in this movie related to telekinesis were one character making another character either do something against their will or convince their mind to think things were happening that weren’t. Is that the limitation? Can these people use their mental powers to control other objects? Fly? What can they do, or more importantly, what CAN’T they do? Even though I wasn’t really invested in most of the movie, some of the things that they reveal, and some of the things they don’t reveal, make the movie just a little bit more interesting. As I mentioned, despite the spatial restraints not really adding tension to everything going on, there are enough twists and turns towards the end to make you question what really happened, along with some pretty decent special effects. Also, the reveal of how this woman actually got her powers was pretty cool, and one of the more interesting methods of conveying that information.

Wolfman Moon Scale

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