By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
So many horror films today have budgets that are either too high and result in major flops (like the disappointing 2012 remakeof The Thing) or too low and result in embarrassing dreck (like Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey). However, you sometimes get a mid-budget scary film that strikes the perfect balance of high production value and solid chills. A great example of that is the claustrophobic creature feature Crawl, which you can now stream for free on Tubi.
Crawl On Tubi
The plot of Crawl is much more interesting and ambitious than other scaly horror films on Tubi. We follow the adventures of a swimmer who simply wants to check on her dad ahead of an incoming Category 5 hurricane. She finds him in a house that gets flooded and filled with hungry alligators, forcing our protagonist into a fight for her life against both the creepy critters around her and the incoming wrath of Mother Nature.
Crawl has a more reliable cast than other Tubi creature features, including leading actor Kaya Scodelario (best known outside of this film for the Maze Runner movies and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales). She is joined in the onscreen hijinkx by Barry Pepper (best known for The Green Mile and the True Grit remake). Rounding out our compelling cast is Morfydd Clark (best known for Saint Maud and, more recently, for playing Galadriel in Amazon’s Rings of Power television series).
While you can watch Crawl for free on Tubi, audiences once paid plenty of good money to see this unconventional horror survival tale on the silver screen. Against a budget of $13-$15 million, Crawl earned a whopping $91 million at the box office.
This was enough green (and not the alligator variety) for director David Aja to start talking about a possible sequel almost right away, albeit one that would likely follow new characters rather than build off the ones in the first film. His faith in this franchise paid off, and in 2024, Paramount gave the green light to a Crawl sequel, which Aja will once again direct.
While critics often dismiss horror films, Crawl kept them captivated: on Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a critical score of 84 percent. In general, critics praised the film for its blend of fast-moving frights and immersive action, all of which is tied together by Kaya Scodelario’s standout performance. Notably, the movie also has an audience score of 75 percent, highlighting what a crowd-pleaser this slick and straightforward horror film really is.
For longtime horror fans, director Alexandra Aja might be an even bigger reason to watch Crawl on Tubi than its killer cast. He’s directed some fairly compelling remakes of horror classics, including Maniac, The Hills Have Eyes, and (perhaps most infamously) Piranha 3D. His non-remake horror films are also refreshingly distinct, including his stylish slasher High Tension and the fantasy comedy Horns starring a downright devilish Daniel Radcliffe.
Admittedly, Crawl doesn’t do any one thing that is completely innovative or revolutionary…in fact, if you’ve watched similar creature features on Tubi before, you’ve seen plenty of agitated alligators, nasty natural disasters, and fun female leads. However, the secret of Crawl is that it does all of this and more so much better than its competition. And the result is a film that ends up being so much more than the sum of its surprisingly compelling individual parts.
Will you find Crawl a creature feature on Tubi sinking your teeth into, or is this one horror film you’d rather toss to the gators? You won’t know until you head into the waters and check it out for yourself. After the credits roll, though, here’s a fair warning: you will spend the next few days checking for hidden beasties whenever you walk into a new room.
