Crawl 🐊 // Train to Busan 🚆 // Underwater 🤿
Happy Friday! What is more summer than the destruction of the planet? Wait that came out wrong. Today’s recommendations are three disaster movies, the epitome of the summer blockbuster. The twist. These are all creature features with horror elements. Three for the price of one!
In movie news: The Academy has announced that streaming-only releases will still be eligible for the 2022 Oscars extending a rule imposed for this year’s ceremony in response to the pandemic. Is this the future of the Oscars? Maybe.
Crawl 🐊
During a hurricane, college swimmer Haley (Kaya Scodelario) ventures into the storm to check on her father (Barry Pepper) who hasn’t returned her calls. She finds him injured in the house’s crawl space. However, she also finds herself up against a congregation of pissed-off alligators leaving her to fight for survival. Here’s the trailer.
Why you should watch it: Crawl is the kind of disaster movie that knows less is more. It could have gone the Sharknado route and had alligators flying across the screen like a cow in Twister, but instead, it’s a tense and taut thriller with a surprisingly emotional father/daughter relationship undercurrent that leaves you rooting for the characters. The scares are genuinely terrifying and it just reinforces what we all knew… Florida be weird sometimes. 87 mins.
Train to Busan 🚆
As an outbreak of the undead plagues the nation, the passengers on an express train to the city of Busan must band together to survive. Here’s the trailer.
Why you should watch it: The zombie movie has gone through more than one cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. However, Train to Busan breathes new life into the genre. Instead of making a zombie movie, director Yeon Sang-ho set out to make a character-based action and survival film — that just happens to have zombies in it.
Carefully crafted action sequences coupled with anxiety-inducing suspense make it well-rounded popcorn fare. However, it’s the emotional core that deals with the themes of class, parenthood, and love that gives the movie its prestigious reputation. 118 mins.
Underwater 🤿
After disaster strikes a deep-sea research station, Norah (Kristen Stewart) and five other researchers must navigate two miles along the dangerous, unknown depths of the ocean floor to make it to safety in a race against time. But something lurks in wait in the darkness. Here’s the trailer.
Why you should watch it: Underwater is the epitome of a disaster movie that doesn’t think too hard. It’s basically an unpretentious retread of Alien that strips away all the pretense that makes Alien great… and that’s okay. The one-dimensional characters and thin plot just let you sit in the legitimately terrifying and suspenseful set pieces featuring some fun creature-feature staples.
📽 P.S. You can see every movie I’ve ever recommended right here.
🍅 I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic on Rotten Tomatoes! You can find new movie reviews here and here.