Crawl or Die

Surprisingly good production value in this tense story of claustrophobic horror survival.

One killer heroine called Tank, in the tone of Ellen Ripley, stands out as a tough warrior with both brains and beauty. The audience is treated with intense action scenes, gory deaths & sweet shots of Nicole Alonso's fabulous, scantily clad backside. She is a producer of the film so she doesn't mind! I would recommend this film to any horror or sci-fi fan out there, especially those who enjoy the film Alien. The plot is exciting, the effort of the characters is exhausting, and the path to freedom is dark and treacherous.

This is an example of a smaller studio sci-fi/horror film done right. I like it so much that this review was written now years after my initial viewing, and directly after my second viewing. It's just one that stuck with me, and maybe you too.

I have seen hundreds of horror movies, but this one was one of the worst. It was so pretentious and of such poor quality that I couldn't focus on the non-existent story. Some people are writing positive reviews saying considering what little budget it had it was passable. I disagree. I think a horror movie needs good acting to be convincing and good special effects if it employs any. Clearly a movie that is trying to portray futuristic High-Tec stuff and is in dire need of special effects cannot and should not be low-budget; otherwise, it will be total garbage just like this movie.

Some people seem to like claustrophobic movies and if that's why they're writing raving reviews for this horrible movie, I'd suggest that you go watch The Pyramid (2014). It's claustrophobic, it has great acting and cinematography and it comes with a lot of effective jump scares. You can even re-watch The Descent (2005), but trust me, with Crawl or Die you're just going to be angry with yourself for wasting your time and money.

Just how on earth is this receiving the high marks on IMDb? I can only imagine it's friends and family of the film maker and cast that are writing them because the reviews do not reflect the quality of this film. It's a badly scripted and badly realised mish mash of influences such as Alien, Aliens and The Descent but without any of the things that made those memorable such as a cohesive plot or character development.

The characters are so one dimensional as to be non existent and are mostly confined to a couple of sentences along with a grunt or two. The main protagonist is a poor copy of Tank Girl and seems to think that simply curling your lip is an accurate portrayal of being tough.

The plot has very big holes and inconsistencies which I don't believe were deliberate but rather that the writer couldn't be bothered to actually be doing with such things and believe that the action would carry it along. That may have been true if the pacing didn't veer from confused to drawn out. This wouldn't work even as a poorly executed video game. The one thing it does do fairly reasonably is a claustrophobic cinematography but this is a one trick pony and wears thin very quickly. If this had been edited down to a 20 minute short it may have had its merits but at its current length this film shows its inadquecies in a woeful manner for all to see.

They say imitation is the highest form of flattery but in this case I really would change that to insult. I don't mind no budget films and love experimental, challenging, indie and art house films but this fails on every level leaving the viewer robbed of the time watching this that could have been used more constructively - for example watching paint dry.

First: I don't want to be too hard on the producers of this video. At least they're not out robbing banks and make an honest living trying -as best as they know how- to bring us entertainment. I would give them 10 stars for that if it were a criteria for rating here. But alas! It is not.

The earth is overrun by the "OVT" virus (Whatever the f!!ck that is) and a special forces unit is given the task of escorting -in their commander's words- "the last non-infected, virus-free, fertile woman alive" to Earth 2. Now he could have just said "non-infected" or "virus-free" but repeatedly chose to compound those two terms (Maybe he thought his team was stupid and wasn't taking any chances in case they didn't understand the meaning of one term?).

This movie is brought to us, we are told at the start, by "Backyard Films" which is something I can well believe. I couldn't make sense of the action in the first part of this video (I can't call this a "movie" folks). Speaking of action, the last two-thirds of the movie is spent in narrow underground tubes or tunnels. One is of some kind of plastic or metal and the other is soil. It gets increasingly cramped. So much so, they can only move an inch at a time WHEN THEY MOVE. If you can't run, kick, jump, shoot -where's the entertainment? What we see mostly is people inching or crawling along like this dull video. After inching forward about 3 inches, the lead chick stops, grimaces, looks around, musters up some incredible inner reserve and moves 3 more inches. And so on, and so on. I kid you not, this is a huge chunk of this "movie".

Maybe the people who made this video knew it was going to get dull once they got to the narrow tunnels, so just before she goes in, the lead Ops chick who has a blonde punk mohawk hair style, and wears knee-high fetish boots with thick rubber soles, takes off her pants and gives it to the doctor to rip into strips for bandage for the injured non-infected "plus" virus-free woman. She's now left wearing some ultra short shorts (At this point I perk up). This could get interesting if the camera guy or gal does his or her job properly. Unfortunately the camera person was "gun-shy", so to speak and didn't give me the angles and close-ups I wanted. Maybe the Backyard people didn't want to appear exploitive. In which case: Why use all of the punk Ops pants for bandage? Could have just used the legs. But they had her strip down to her short shorts and then chickened out once she got in the tunnels.

Now before anyone thinks of me as base, let me say this: If you're going to confine a woman so she can't run, jump, shoot, face-off with that cheap Alien knock-off of a creature -what else is there? If you want to keep at least "some" of your audience, you might as well use your camera to lovingly study the beauty of the female form as she pushes, struggles, and wiggles thru some very tight places. Love, Boloxxxi.

I was very impressed. It was low budget that had about $7,000 or so put into it. Don't let that dissuade you from watching it. They squeezed everything they could out of the money they had and came up with an entertaining film. Nicole Alonso did a very good job as the kick-ass, tough girl marine (or whatever part of the military she was in). Not meaning to sound perverted, but I'm glad she stripped down do her panties. lol She has a nice body. Her acting was very good, and the emotion she put into the scenes I thought was also very accurate. The script had limited dialogue, but she didn't need to say much, because her facial expressions conveyed what she was going through. I'm not one who cares much for the tight confines of the tunnels, but they made it work pretty much for the film. However, I think it was a little repetitious with all the crawling they did. Still, the acting was better than a lot of the big budget projects out there - hello, Transformers. lol.

One of the peeps who wrote a review on this board said throw some money to these people. I agree. Based on what they did with this production, I think they are the kind of film makers that can make a little money go a long way. Imagine what this movie would've been like had they put $1mil or $2mil into it. I'll be looking forward to seeing what they do next. The horror genre needs all the help it can get. :)