‘Crawlers’ has just enough legs to get by

    There are some obvious bugs in “Crawlers,” but it’s hard not to get even a little bit entangled in its spiderweb of jump scares and gross-out sight gags as it cashes in on our shared arachnophobia.   

    The premise is simple: A cross-section of quirky folks living in a rundown apartment building suddenly finds itself besieged by poisonous spiders. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the health department quarantines the building, meaning no one gets in, or, more direly, no one gets out. So, one by one, the tenants meet a variety of gruesome ends.  

    This enables director Ángel Gómez Hernández to exhaust the makeup and special effects budget by “treating” us to desecrated corpses that become playgrounds for spiders to crawl in and out of, even popping from behind an eyeball or two. The offending spiders come in all sorts of sizes and textures, with the tarantula types proving the most unnerving as they descend upon their prey before delivering the coup de grâce.  

    The problem is that almost all the victims are as forgettable as the movie, largely because of a subpar cast led by Matilda Lutz as Serena, the building’s live-in super and the film’s wholesome “last girl.” Like a ship’s captain, she refuses to abandon her surly, ungrateful charges, who habitually do the dumbest things to make survival even harder.  

    Writer Jayson Rothwell gifts none of these non-descript morons the benefit of a personality. They are mere fodder for their eight-legged tormentors. At times, I found myself rooting for the spiders, especially when they turn their sights on William Miller as Serena’s obnoxious, condescending boss and owner of this house of horrors. Actually, Miller is quite good at being bad.  

     Yet, even at a brief 81 minutes, “Crawlers” feels long and drawn out, as Hernandez and Rothwell quickly run out of ideas and resort to the usual fright tactics. But Lutz is such a magnetic actress that you stick with her to the bitter end. I say “bitter” because it involves a helpless baby. It’s a gag too far, even for a cheesy B movie like this one.  

    As they say, it could have been worse, and “Crawlers” does its best to cross the line. But if it’s skin-crawling creeps you’re seeking, this one has just enough bite to it.  

Movie review 

Crawlers 

Rated: R for brief sexual material, violent content, bloody images and language 

Cast: Matilda Lutz, Melina Matthews, William Miller and Andrea Scott Mendez 

Director: Ángel Gómez Hernández 

Writer: Jayson Rothwell 

Runtime: 81 minutes 

Where: In theaters Oct. 16  

Grade: C+