Creepy Crawly
**This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.
In Thailand, the title of this is “The One Hundred,” but honestly, I think “Creepy Crawly” is a slightly better title. Both work, but the latter- which is being used for the American release- is more evocative of the B-movie horror film this is. That’s not to say this is a film that’s goofy and ridiculous, but there are definitely moments that feel lifted straight out of the ’50s sci-fi horror genre that “Mystery Science Theater 3000” skewered so well, and honestly, I’m not complaining. I had a really good time with this one.
This is the second straight Blu-Ray release I’ve watched from Well Go USA that uses the COVID-19 pandemic as its backdrop. What this does that I love so much is how it plays up the anxiety we all had that anyone could get the disease at any time, from anyone else, even if we were doing everything right. I wouldn’t say anyone is doing anything right in “Creepy Crawly” once they get into the hotel for quarantine- nobody really stays in their rooms- but if you’re going to borrow liberally from the structure of “The Thing,” and repurpose it towards COVID anxiety, there are less successful ways of doing it.
The original title refers to the number of legs centipedes have, and those always unsettling insects play a fundamental role in this film, which begins with a scene of a vlogger camping alone before setting up the story proper, where several people (including a family and another vlogger and her brother) are put in a hotel for quarantine for two weeks. They are told to stay in their rooms, but obviously, that does not happen, and we start to see dynamics and personalities form. This time, the vlogger is someone who goes to hotels to find something wrong, which makes the manager nervous; meanwhile, the staff is more concerned that she lied about preexisting conditions on her intake form. What they’ll really have to worry about is the bloodthirsty creature that made its way into the hotel, and will be killing everyone within it.
As I mentioned, the structure of this is very much “The Thing,” and while I don’t know that the characters written by directors Chalit Krileadmongkon & Pakphum Wongjinda have nearly as much of an iconic stature as those in John Carpenter’s classic, I would say they do right by the form. This is a film that doesn’t simply use the setting of COVID-19 as a setting for cosmetic sake, but the way the film operates, it taps into that sense of uncertainty a lot of us felt at the beginning of the pandemic. Even if I’m doing everything right, how can I trust that other people are? What if I want to let my guard down just slightly? If we’re both quarantined, doesn’t that mean we can find some connection together? Ultimately, the film dives into the bloody horror of it all, and it’s successful in that, in large part because of what we’ve come to know about the characters. I enjoyed every minute of this film, even the ending, which hints that a rematch might be coming up. I don’t know if a sequel is required, but “Creepy Crawly” certainly does enough to make me curious what that would look like.
