CRAWLERS (2026)

Studio:   Saban Films
Director: Angel Gomez Hernandez
Writer:   Jayson Rothwell
Producer: Alexandra Milchan, Josh Weinstock, Basil Iwanyk, Erica Lee, Scott Strauss, Peter Welter, Jayson Rothwell
Stars:    Matilda Lutz, Gregg Sulkin, Sam Lucas Smith

Review Score:

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Summary:

A hard-working maintenance manager and her eclectic tenants fight for their lives when deadly spiders overrun an apartment building.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Struggling musician Serena, who ekes out a living as the live-in manager of the Paradiso Palms apartment building, tends to a massive slate of maintenance repairs. Frightened by a spider found in one of the units, Serena summons her neighbor George, a UCLA professor who recently returned from an expedition in Papua New Guinea, to humanely collect the spider. Serena notices that George appears ill.

Upon returning to his apartment, George suddenly drops dead. A large wound on his back that he acquired on his trip leaks pus, releasing venomous spiders that begin infesting the building.

Sleazy building owner Mr. Rossmore passively threatens to evict Serena as he tasks her with more work, including informing the residents of a rent increase. This leads to Serena having uncomfortable interactions with tenants that include arrogant nurse Tonya, Wall Street wannabe Zander, tech nerd Lance, artist and social media personality Bradley, Esther, and Bernice.

Serena has pleasant encounters with Paul, a new father raising a baby, and Lady Lash, an elegantly styled dominatrix. Having had a similarly neglected upbringing, Serena sympathizes with her music student Molly, whose socialite mother Jalene tasks Serena with looking after her daughter while she is in Las Vegas.

Worried that she hasn’t seen George, Serena enters his apartment and finds his alarmingly grotesque corpse. Concerned about the unknown cause of George’s death, police and a biohazard team from the Infectious Disease Center (IDC) force the building into a 48-hour quarantine, which frustrates the angry residents.

After he finishes a livestream to auction an avant-garde painting, a massive spider births numerous spiders that attack Bradley in his apartment. Bradley tries escaping to the hallway, but he trips, smashing his head on the doorknob outside Serena’s unit. Spiders swarm and kill Bradley.

With cellphone and internet communication to the building cut, Serena exits her apartment to find Bradley’s corpse. A large spider bursts out of the body’s eye socket. Unable to call 911, Serena tries to alert a cop stationed outside the lobby door that the building is being overrun by spiders, not a contagious virus. The cop merely walks away.

Alongside Bernice, Serena tells Lance they need his tech expertise to bypass the blackout and contact the IDC for help. Inside Lance’s apartment, the three neighbors see that a spider Lance fed it earlier burst out of his pet snake. Terrified of the potential danger, Serena asks for help warning other residents, but Lance and Bernice exit to take the elevator to presumed safety instead.

A water leak knocks out the building’s electricity, trapping Lance and Bernice in the elevator. Spiders begin to swarm, and their weight causes the elevator’s ceiling to collapse. The spiders kill Lance and Bernice.

After a brief visit with Lady Lash, Serena checks on Molly. Serena and Molly hide in Molly’s bathroom to defend against a spider swarm. Meanwhile, spiders kill Tonya in her bed.

Armed with special weapons, Dr. Woodward and Dr. Callan from the IDC rescue Serena and Molly from the spiders. Dr. Woodward places a timed bomb intended to eradicate the infestation with corrosive gas. Molly gets bit. Dr. Callan immediately escorts her outside where medics can neutralize the venom. Dr. Woodward encourages Serena to leave too, but she instead runs back to the overrun top floor to find any remaining residents.

On her way to Lady Lash’s apartment, Serena sees spiders kill Zander in a hallway. Once inside the apartment, Serena tells Lady Lash she has to let her BDSM client out of his gimp box. The client turns out to be property owner Mr. Rossmore.

Having followed Serena, Dr. Woodward enters Lady Lash’s unit. A spider bites Woodward. Lady Lash battles her way through a separate swarm to leave. Threatening Serena with a knife, Rossmore steals Woodward’s hazmat suit.

While attempting to escape, Rossmore falls, breaking the protective glass on his helmet. Rossmore sees Esther dead on the floor beside him. Swarmed by spiders, Rossmore slides down the trash chute only to be impaled on jagged shards of a broken mirror that was discarded earlier.

Serena dresses in Lady Lash’s vinyl dominatrix outfit to protect herself against the spiders. She also activates the 10-minute timer on the bomb but then hears Paul’s baby crying nearby. In his apartment, Serena finds Paul dead. Serena fights through the spiders to rescue Paul’s child, ultimately sacrificing her beloved guitar to smash the resilient queen spider to death.

The bomb’s countdown expires, releasing gas that kills the spiders throughout the building. Serena is unable to make it outside before the bomb goes off. However, when the IDC enters the building after the gas dissipates, they discover Serena saved herself and the newborn by hiding in a refrigerator that protected them from the gas.

Molly’s mother Jalene reunites with Molly in the hospital. The two of them join a recovering Serena and Lady Lash, who had been monitoring Paul’s infant in the NICU. When the women are no longer looking, a small spider crawls out of the baby’s ear.

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Review:

“Crawlers” opens on text that rattles off a few supposed statistics. The first is that for every person, there are three million spiders. That seems impossibly high, but whatever. The second says spiders exist in 100% of homes, though I’m not sure how that includes arctic areas or wintry climates. Apparently, we’re never more than three feet away from one, which I find particularly hard to believe. Also, if they ever “decide to eat humans,” the world’s population would be dead within a year. Lol at spiders “deciding” to eat humans.

Being a B-movie more focused on frightful fun than undeniable facts, I don’t feel any need to check the movie’s work on these questionable numbers. I doubt anyone watching a spider-centric horror flick will care much about the truth either. With one final warning that there’s “probably a spider under your seat” right now, “Crawlers” confirms its main objective, really its only objective, is just to creep out arachnophobes with goosebump-giving chills where an insect or animal runs amok.

Although there are one or two visual gags and several snarky lines of dialogue, I’d hesitate to call “Crawlers” a comedy. Its tongue isn’t so much in cheek as lightly licking the roof of its mouth on occasion. The movie mostly gets quick hits of quirk from a typically eclectic roster of moderately eccentric personalities that are more caricatures than characters.

“Revenge’s” (review here) Matilda Lutz headlines as Serena, a struggling musician who barely makes ends meet by doing maintenance work as the live-in manager for Paradiso Palms, a rundown apartment building owned by Mr. Rossmore. You can tell he’s sleazy from the mustache over his smirk as he ogles Serena’s ass, and from the lounge lizard suit that resembles used car salesman couture. You can tell she’s hardworking because she keeps her hair tied back and has cutoff sleeves on the sweatshirt worn while toiling on thankless tasks. You also know Serena is sweet from the way she longingly looks at a keepsake photo of her mother gifting her a guitar when she was a child. Aww.

Mr. Rossmore’s uncaring demand for increased rent forces Serena into awkward interactions that introduce everyone else. There’s an unspoken battle between Esther, a vacant-faced woman who vapes in Serena’s face while colored lights pulse to loud music behind her, and Bradley, an egotistical artist who shoots classic images with Pollock-esque paintballs for auction on Instagram, for who wears heavier eyeliner. Wall Street wannabe Zander wheels and deals over a headset while wearing a suitcoat up top and Lakers shorts down below. Across the hall, easy-to-aggravate tech nerd Lance finds friendship in his pet snake as well as an obedient AI companion he programmed himself.

There are other peculiar residents, but you get the picture of Paradiso Palms’ population. These folks are the obvious fodder for when an unstoppable swarm of venomous spiders needs to feed after bursting out of a professor who recently returned from an expedition in Papua New Guinea, possibly one of the least offensive locations to pin the problem on. Imagine the outrage if the filmmakers went with Wuhan or somewhere in South America.

Not everyone in the building is an a-hole, just most of them. Dressed in nondescript clothing, new father Paul sneaks away from his baby to smoke a cigarette and smile with appreciation for Serena’s songs. There’s also Serena’s young music student Molly, the neglected daughter of a socialite mother, which opens the door for one of the film’s only emotional moments when Molly and a sympathetic Serena solemnly bond over being the latchkey children of single parents.

Those collective details meet the minimum requirements to lay the groundwork for above average creature-feature entertainment. You can’t be overly critical of “Crawlers” because it isn’t built for big drama, big laughs, or even big action. It’s compact, a little claustrophobic, and aimed directly at people who get the creepy-crawlies simply from seeing spiders stalk around. There’s no shortage of shots where someone’s hand, usually Matilda Lutz’s, unknowingly avoids swiping an unnoticed arachnid as swelling music suddenly evaporates once the near-miss moment passes. Such scenes compose most of the movie’s scares, but since “Crawlers” only runs a little over 80 minutes, repeated beats don’t drag the film too far into redundancy.

We need a single word to encapsulate a regular horror movie that’s a step above SyFy, several steps below major motion picture, and somewhere around streaming level that isn’t an automatic throwaway, but nowhere near a must-see either. That’s meant matter-of-factly, not derisively. Whatever that word may be, it fits “Crawlers,” as the movie accomplishes its “get in, get out” mission professionally, albeit imperfectly, which describes most modern horror where low budgets come with low expectations. “Crawlers” doesn’t have the biggest bite by any means, but at least you’ll feel it on your arm before the sting has a chance to completely fade away.

Review Score: 65

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