Crabs! (2021)

Plot

Irradiated flesh-eating horseshoe crabs scuttle ashore and wreak havoc through a small town. It’s up to a group of the town’s teenagers to save the day as they battle the crabs, which are evolving into increasingly bigger and more cunning forms.

---

A throwback to the 50s sci-fi shockers of the past where normal everyday creatures were mutated by atomic radiation and turned into unstoppable killing machines, Crabs! also takes cues from the likes of Gremlins and Critters before a jump-the-shark finale puts it firmly into Godzilla territory. It’s hard to really lump Crabs! Into a specific genre since it maniacally changes direction at the drop of a hat and morphs into something completely different to how it originally appears. With its tongue planted firmly in its cheek and with an approach which defies usual conventions, it’s certainly one of the most unique films I’ve reviewed on here for some time – definitely one that will split opinions too.

Crabs! opens strongly with a prologue which delivers plenty of daft face hugger-esque practical effects, nudity, and gore, building up expectations that you’re about to watch a clever send-up of old school monster movies by someone who is clearly tailoring the material for a specific audience. It’s an approach which you’ll recognise but there’s enough gas in the tank for the script to keep going in this direction. Things do slightly change tonally after this opening and the first half of the film works almost as a Gremlins or Critters style monster flick, rather than some cheesy 80s gore fest, with the crabs being small and mischievous more than outright deadly. There’s lots of mileage to be had at this point as the crabs cause havoc across the town and even show some individual personality traits. The scuttling, hard-shelled practical effects are decent (with the film reminding us that horseshoe crabs aren’t actually crabs but chelicerates, more closely related to arachnids!); just goofy enough to warrant a laugh but deadly enough to be scared of. Crabs! is at its best when it’s allowing the monsters to cause some carnage and have a bit of fun in the process.

Sadly, this is one of Crabs! problems which is that it doesn’t allow the monsters to cause enough carnage, instead opting to focus on the antics of the teen cast. It’s not that they’re unlikeable (well, one is but more on that in a moment), it’s just that too much time is spent on them with the script becoming too much of a comedy – it always favours the characters and having a laugh over the monsters and creating some tension or horror. Every twist and set piece that is presented breaks down quickly and Crabs! then changes into something even more ludicrous – bigger, sillier and more confusing. Director and writer Pierce Berolzheimer seems to be one of those who has a weird sense of humour and expects everyone to understand it – things happen in Crabs! because he found it hilarious, rather than any natural growth of the plot.

With a big showdown at a prom resembling something more akin to Carrie and a drive through the town as the townspeople are getting massacred being suitably unnerving, Crabs! seemingly has nowhere left to go down the horror route. The crabs have mutated into big men-in-suit versions, and you’d think that was it – the script will have the characters find a way to stop them at this point in their evolution. But the climax of the film sees the script take an even sillier turn right off the horror page and into kaiju territory as the crabs now grow to city-stomping size like Godzilla and the teenage inventor conjures up an Ultraman-like transforming robot shaped like a shark to battle the enemy. This finale comes completely out of leftfield and really ruins the film, resembling a low budget episode of Power Rangers. Mutated horseshoe crabs are just about believable if you can conjure up some pseudo-realistic science but giant robots built by a kid are just not on the same level of tolerance. Some may like the sudden change in direction but I thought it was far too daft for its own good and completely took me out of the film, which for all of its faults, had been reasonably entertaining. The effects are pretty weak at this point and the CGI totally unconvincing.

I mentioned a character earlier in my review and it would be remiss of me to completely ignore the elephant in the room. It’s very rare that one character can completely destroy a movie on their own, but the character of Radu, a travesty of a caricature, easily does it. You will reach for the volume every time this idiot opens his mouth. The character is an Eastern European exchange student, perhaps even with learning disabilities, and is meant to be the film’s comic relief but he’s such an exaggerated stereotype with a whiny, irritating voice that is not only massively unfunny but offensive as hell. This was made in 2021, not 1981, and the entire range of backwards ex-Soviet country jokes and gags is thrown around. It’s like he just walked off the set of Borat! I’m British, not Eastern European, and it takes a lot to offend me in films but this portrayal did just that. He makes the film unwatchable at times and he gets far too much screen time as a supporting character. Even typing this review up, I can here his goofy third-person talking voice.

---

Final Verdict

Crabs! was a frustrating watch. Filled with plenty of decent material that would really cater to an undemanding horror fan’s Friday night appetite, it makes far too many idiotic decisions with its direction and tone that it ends up hurting the end product, rather than adding to it. Bring the final third back to reality, bin Radu and then you have a decent creature feature that you could easily rewatch at a party. But there’s no chance that idiot Radu will ever grace my speakers again.

---

Crabs! Director(s): Pierce Berolzheimer Writer(s): Pierce Berolzheimer Actor(s): Dylan Riley Snyder, Jessica Morris, Allie Jennings, Robert Craighead, Dash Pomerantz, Bryce Durfee, Kurt Carley, Katrina Landa Duration: 80 mins