I don't know what it is about apartment buildings and killer spiders, but that is apparently what's hot in B-movie land. But where 2024's "Sting's" budget failed its own ambition, this year's "Crawlers" knows exactly what it is and has just enough money to mostly realize it. This is a thoroughly goofy creature feature that, what it lacks in honest characters it more than makes up for it a cast with wacky characteristics. That goes for the evil spiders too.
The film begins with a text crawl about spiders, whether or not they're factual or not I don't know, but it amusingly ends with the text "there's probably a spider underneath your seat." Then an overweight guy returns from a business trip, ill from a real bad looking wound on his shoulder. He probably should have gotten it checked out, but instead decided to microwave some pizza, you know, because he's fat. Then he passes out on the ground and little, itty-bitty little eight-legged bugs escape from his flesh. There's no explanation as to where he went or why he was bit, but who cares? Let's get on with the monster mash!
Matilda Lutz stars at Serena, an aspiring musician who works at her apartment building as the maintenance manager. She hates it and the other tenants hate her too, especially since she had to hand out the owner's rent increase. I immediately sympathized with her and immediately hated the others, and was worried that the film wasn't going to be able to make me care what's going on, especially with its hour and twenty one minute runtime. The script, credited to Jayson Rothwell, doesn't spend much time fleshing anyone out, but it does give us just enough time to see one live-stream himself paintballing wall art. Another tinkers with computers while flirting with his AI girlfriend. It's all just so odd and unexpected that I began enjoying them and their silliness. But I still definitely wanted to see them turn into spider chow.
And boy do the little buggars eat. Hardly any time passes before the entire building is covered in their webs, but it wouldn't be a monster movie if the characters noticed right away. It's Serena who first notices the dead body, the source of the infestation, and the government quickly quarantines the building, no one in or out until scientists can determine the cause of death. Phone lines are eventually cut as is the internet, I think because the people in hazmat suits don't want the people to talk to anyone on the outside, but there's no way for them to report an emergency so I dunno. It's almost as if the filmmakers needed a way to force everyone out of their rooms to encourage the spiders to the attack. But this isn't the kind of movie where one is supposed to ask those kind of questions.
The body count swiftly rises as the creepy crawlies literally crawl out of every which way, but way before the characters notice the spiders, we the audience have noticed them long before. We see them sneak around the walls, creeping behind everything from the toilet paper to the TVs. There's one scene where an arachnid hides in a bag of chips, and we see both the person's and spider's point-of-view.
Director Angel Gómez Hernández handles things with a snappy direction, utilizing interesting camera angles and staging fake outs with the environment. See someone puffing on a cigarette? A lesser film would follow that up with the hero creating a makeshift flamethrower, but no, not "Crawlers." Instead we get BDSM whips slapping spiders into paste, and it is glorious.
