Crawlers (2026) Roadside Attractions/Horror RT: 86 minutes Rated R (violent content/bloody images, language, brief sexual material) Director: Angel Gomez Hernandez Screenplay: Jayson Rothwell Music: Joan Martorell Cinematography: Pablo Rosso Release date: October 16, 2026 (US) Cast: Matilda Lutz, Gregg Sulkin, Melina Matthews, William Miller, Isabella Egizi, Chris Rogers, Elena Sanz, Diana Cruz, Lea Vivier, Paul S. Tracey, Sam Lucas Smith, Estela Aniorte, Andrea Scott Mendez, Gary Anthony Stennette, Lex Salvador, Hal Rothwell, Carlos Toca, Angel Gomez Rivero.
Rating: ***
Arachnophobes are advised to steer clear of Crawlers. Hell, it might even trigger those who aren’t afraid of spiders. The deadly little buggers infecting a whole apartment complex are many and quite scary. I was feeling a little itchy myself as I left the cinema.
Directed by Angel Gomez Hernandez (Don’t Listen), Crawlers is a good, old-fashioned, campy creature feature with a palpable sense of claustrophobia. The terror begins when one of the tenants (Rogers, The Running Man) unknowingly brings a venomous spider back with him from a trip. It exits his body, killing him and quickly multiplying. It isn’t long before the entire building is overrun with the nasty, eight-legged freaks.
The heroine of the story is building super Serena (Lutz, Rings), an aspiring musician who does the best she can keeping up with maintenance in a shabby, rundown complex run by a nasty landlord (Miller, Warrior Nun). The tenants, most of them fairly rude and demanding, include a snotty female lawyer, a tech geek, a social media guy, a d-bag yuppie, a single dad with a baby, a dominatrix and a teen girl whose mother is away on business.
Initially believing the problem to be a virus, the whole building is placed under quarantine until the issue is resolved. In addition, all communications are shut down leaving the tenants trapped with the deadly aggressive arachnids. I’ll only say that not everybody lives to see a new day dawn.
Crawlers opens with titles reading, “For every single person there are three million spiders. If spiders decide to eat humans… we’ll all be dead in one year. You are never more than three feet from a spider. Please don’t be alarmed but… there’s probably a spider under your seat.” A smile spread across my face as I read these words. It’s like something out of a William Castle movie minus some silly gimmick designed to get butts in the seats. And while Crawlers is fun for the most part, it struggles with tone. The mix of humor and horror is an uneasy one. It doesn’t know what it wants to be and the lack of self-confidence shows.
Crawlers isn’t the kind of film that demands brilliant acting. All that’s required of the actors is the ability to scream good and loud. Everybody does both very well. Full disclosure, I’m not familiar with any of the actors in Crawlers. I saw Rings once when it first came out in 2017 and have no desire to revisit it. I don’t specifically recall Matilda Lutz in it, but she’s okay here. She’s easy on the eyes anyway. The rest of the cast is varying degrees of okay. That’s really all I have to say on this particular subject.
Now let’s talk about something that does matter, the special effects. The spiders are CGI; the gore and webs are practical FX. The CGI isn’t too bad. It’s actually quite good for a B-movie. It’s better than what you’d see on a Syfy original movie. The gross-out moments are sufficiently gross thanks to convincing make-up work. Some of it will definitely make people squirm. An early scene of a spider emerging from a man’s body had most of the audience wincing. The webs have a tactile look to them.
The storyline is silly and simple. The one-dimensional characters aren’t terribly bright. They do dumb things. Two of them get themselves trapped in an elevator and practically invite the arachnid invaders in there with them through their own stupidity. And that’s what makes Crawlers so much fun. The biggest laugh I got out of it was Serena watching a movie in her apartment. It was The Giant Spider Invasion (1975). How fitting is that?
In the end, Crawlers is a solid B-movie with a 70s grindhouse vibe. It stumbles in the dark a little, but it’s fun nonetheless.
