It Crawls Beneath

A boring type of stuck in one position movie. I don't have of enough words to explain my disdain for this movie. First the dialogue is poor. The plot is worse. Being trapped is not new to any movie genre but being trapped and being generally annoying is new. I don't know what the budget was but it had to be low. If it's a horror movie you are looking for, skip past this one and find something else. But if you want your fill from subterranean creatures that don't have an origin then this may be the movie for you. Unfortunately my taste is for better actors better scripts and better movies but hey to each their own.

No pun intended - the movie is .. well you have to cut it quite some slack. You have to be a fan of horror movies too. Michael Pare is I reckon a known name, but it is someone else who is the main character here - Pare is only there to add some name recognition I suppose.

The real star are the special effects anyway - which are not bad considering this is a low budget movie. Still the question is, can you dig (no pun intended) being closed off, being a "prisoner" in a close space and just let the absurdity of the movie rule over you and the running time? I don't judge any actor or rather their acting abilities just based on this movie - you probably shouldn't either ... they don't act ... naturally ... again no pun intended.

(2022) They Crawl Beneath THRILLER HORROR

Uncle Bill Moritz (Michael Paré) gets himself bitten by a worm-like creature, and thinks nothing of it when he swats it off his leg. Bill's nephew, Danny Moritz (Joseph Almani) then picks it up and puts it into a jar so that his ex can have it examined. And when Danny's ex leaves a message on his phone regarding the infected and dangerous worm, he does not even answer it. And then when both Bill and Danny are working underneath their vintage car, an earthquake begins to erupt. And if anyone were to see this, Danny had enough time to pull himself out of their before he was being crushed, and at the same time pull his uncle out of their as well. But what does he do, he just continues to leave his legs underneath their, so that the car is able to crush his legs. For the next hour or so, he does a lot of reflecting self evaluating on his personal life, who eventually realizes that Bill was not his uncle after all but that he may be his actual father after all. We also get to see how both him and his ex Gwen Bishop (Karlee Eldridge) and the reason why his police officer duties were placing a strain on their relationship. And the reason is hogwash, as despite being injured trying to prevent a robbery from happening that he got himself injured, but yet he still wants to return to his duties. As far as I know, officers are not permitted to continue to work if he or she were injured on the job, the protocol was that they are supposed to stay home and collect workers compensation. This movie does not appear to acknowledge that, anticipating anyone who watches this to be gullible idiots without knowing anything.

On one scene the worm like creature was supposed to be afraid of the light except that at the beginning when the doctor studied it, it cocooned into something else. And yet light was pointed to it throughout the entire time before it killed the doctor. The ending was dumb as Danny's partner, Holder (Christopher M. Dukes) could have used his own squad car to ram through the garage door or use the squad car to pull the door open. Do we do not even get to see the worm who killed the doctor at the beginning destroyed. The worm killed the dog around the area but the dog's owner, Ed is nowhere in sight nor does he matter anymore. And despite officer Danny himself being trapped with the worms, not one of their fellow officers ever consider slipping him their revolver underneath to shoot them down while many of them were trying to lift the door open to pull him out. One of the more dumber and convoluted movies ever.

Bad writing, bad acting, bad sound mixing. I think the worst part was the main character being trapped under a car for about 20 minutes of the movie. That was just dumb writing, maybe it was the only way they could fit in a monologue for the main character? Yeah, skip this.

The writing really tried to add some depth to this but all of the character plots given were just cliche or boring. What about the monsters? Confined to one location making things even more uneventful and boring. The pace was slow, I skipped through swaths of it just to get to something of actual interest so least to say I watched a good 30 minutes of this movie and that was still more than enough.

I sat the whole movie out, but to be honest, I more than once used the FF button. Watching a man lying trapped under a car in a garage for what feels like an hour, gets pretty tedious, even if there are weird maggot-like worms creeping up on him. I guess the makers wanted to evoke the claustrophobic feeling of main character Danny, and in this they succeeded, but that doesn't automatically make for compelling cinema. The worms should have made the difference, but they were just too fake and unconvincing.

The lack of logic didn't make things any better. Like that a bite by a worm should be lethal within three hours, but we see Danny struggle for what seems to be endlessly, and he still can put up some heroic physical fights with the creatures up until the last minutes! Then there were these unnecessary side-storylines: Danny discovering (during the predicament of his being trapped!) that his real father is in fact the guy that lies crushed to death next to him under the same car; and his relational problems with his girlfriend. They didn't add anything whatsoever to the main story; if Bill would have been just a friend, and Danny's relation with Angela all peachy, then the story wouldn't have changed a bit! And finally they came up again with this lamest of clichés: a smartphone having only 3 percent battery (in the middle of the day?! What on earth did Danny do with that phone all morning long?!).

My only positive feeling concerned Joseph Armani as Danny, albeit mainly for his great looks. As an actor they didn't give him much to put his teeth in (well, except for one of the worms!).