Summary
Into the Dark: Crawlers is one of Blumhouse’s duds for their Hulu anthological series. They could have easily removed this from the release schedule.
This review of Hulu’s Into the Dark: Crawlers (Episode 6 of Season 2) contains minor spoilers — the film will be available on Hulu on March 6, 2020.
This is the problem with Hulu’s Into the Dark and I find myself repeating this over and over again — consistency. It’s almost like Blumhouse have a few ideal concepts in mind for the anthology series but it sneaks in a few duds with the hope that we won’t notice. But we do; they are painstakingly obvious and when you put them side by side with their satisfactory instalments, they really stand out like a sore thumb.
Into the Dark: Crawlers brings forward the following slasher plot concept: a bunch of teenagers are celebrating St Patrick’s Day in America. The night is young, but there are aliens lurking, ready to kill and transform into doppelgangers.
Sounds good, right?
But it’s so badly storyboarded and scripted that you are bored within the first few scenes. We have a narrator that breaks down the scenario for half a film; the social groups, how she learned about these aliens and the conspiracy behind it. But the problem is, Into the Dark: Crawlers is not a complex storyline at all; it requires no laboured contextualising — it’s pretty much an alien slasher film rolled up in St Patrick’s Day so the production team could use a lot of green props and lighting for good measure.
And there’s kind of a “final girl” and that’s where Into the Dark: Crawlers tries to slide in a #MeToo theme, but again, the context is so on the surface that it looks too transparent to be appreciated. The film feels like an experiment by an upcoming production team that wanted to have some fun, and it failed at many hurdles.
And slashers are meant to be thrilling and slightly jumpy — Into the Dark: Crawlers is barely exciting and does not even try and engage with the violence in a fun, entertaining way.
I imagine the next one in this grand anthological instalment will please, but that kind of defeats the point — we wait every month for this.
