Angel Gómez Hernández’s arachnophobic new film “Crawlers” is like that classic “Kids in the Hall” sketch about a horror author whose latest book, “Hey, There’s a Spider on Your Back!” consists of only seven words: “Hey, there’s a spider on your back.” It was, needless to say, a bestseller. Say what you will about the lack of poetry, but telling someone they’ve got a spider on them is an effective and efficient delivery mechanism for terror.
“Crawlers” takes place in a California apartment complex, where a UCLA professor returns from an international trip and dies horrifically in his own kitchen. The cause of death is a large, ulcerating pustule on his shoulder that bursts open, unleashing a slimy torrent of deadly spiders. The arachnids creep into the air ducts, grow to the size of rats and breed like crazy, until the building is infested and has to be quarantined with all the residents still inside.
The film — like “Hey, There’s a Spider on Your Back!” — gets the job done. Hernández has a knack for acrobatic camera movements and assembles a cast of memorable characters, but the best and scariest parts are when we get: Hey! There’s a spider on your back! There’s a spider in your sandals! There’s a spider in your potato chips! There’s a spider behind your… eyeball? Ewwwwwww.
“Crawlers” begins with playful little title cards which claim that for every single person on planet Earth, there are three million spiders. (If you’re wondering where your three million spiders are, you can thank late stage capitalism, because a billionaire is probably hoarding them all.) The cards also say if spiders turned on humanity all at once, they’d take over the planet within a year. (That’s probably a metaphor for the proletariat.) They also claim there’s probably a spider under your seat right now. (Which is true, capitalism or no capitalism.)
What an impish, William Castle-esque introduction. It sets the stage for a good, old-fashioned fright fest. We meet the tenants of this crappy complex, most of whom are spider food waiting to happen, but we focus on the long-suffering superintendent, Serena (Matilda Lutz). She’s trying to keep this ramshackle building together, but it’s a big job, she’s not entirely qualified, and everyone blames her for the wet floors, broken glass and every other little thing that goes wrong.
That’s the least plausible thing about this giant killer spider movie where the lead arachnid psychically controls its brethren, because everybody in Los Angeles knows you don’t blame your super, you blame your evil landlord. But in “Crawlers” there’s a reason to deviate from that reality; it means we can take pleasure when these elitist a-holes who punch down at our working class hero meet their demise. Don’t worry, their evil landlord doesn’t get off scot-free either. (See? The parentheticals about capitalism were going somewhere the whole time.)
Matilda Lutz can carry a movie like this. She’s convincingly world-weary, as if she’s planning to give up entirely if she suffers just one more humiliation. Then the humiliation comes, and she moves the goal posts and waits for the next one. When killer spiders invade it’s almost a relief, because at last she finally has a sense of purpose. The rest of the tenants are, for the most part, unlikable jerks, and the cast seems to enjoy cutting loose. Only the local gothic dominatrix, played with wisdom and affection by Melina Matthews, is worth saving. Well, her and the teenager and the baby, but kids are worth saving by default.
“Crawlers” has a lot in common with Sébastien Vaniček’s “Infested.” Suspiciously so. I thought it was an official remake at first, but no, it’s just got the same premise and a lighter touch. “Infested” is a mean-spirited horror movie, as angry at society as it is at its spiders. “Crawlers” is mischievous and funny, but just as scary. Hernández has a bag of tricks and uses them all, giving these eight-legged freaks the upper hand in one memorable set piece after another. But again, most importantly, Hernández never forgets the most important part of making a killer spider movie: They’re spiders, and spiders are frightening enough on their own.
These bugs are big, certainly, and venomous, hell yeah, but most people have such a powerful aversion to spiders that even a harmless daddy longlegs will send them bolting out of a bathroom if it walks in uninvited. No matter how clever “Crawlers” is, and it’s quite clever, Angel Gómez Hernández always returns to that primal terror we all feel when somebody says there’s a spider on our back. Because you know what? There shouldn’t be a spider on your back. But there is. There’s a spider on your back right now. And there’s a spider in your coffee mug. Do you feel something behind your eyeball? Twitching around? That’s probably nothing. It’s probably not a spider.
Probably.
“Crawlers” is in theaters now.
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