Zombos Says: Not bad, could have been better.
Public Service Message…Creepy Crawly takes its cue from Thailand's giant venomous centipede, scolopendra subspinipes. So stay the hell out of Thailand…end of public service message.
Three months after Covid-19 began, Big Bee Car Rental drops off a group of people for quarantine at a hotel. Also taking up residence at the hotel, soon enough, are multi-legged big buggers that would even scare away the bedbugs.
The hotel staff soon finds creepy crawlies under a bed while relationships between the hotel staff and the two-legged guests provide the usual emotional turmoil, including a strained relationship between a brother (Pirat Nitipasialkul), sister, and their father. The brother is quick to violence, which comes in handy once the threat manifests itself openly.
That threat starts taking over the hotel and the staff. The action scenes are good but the CGI is wonky when infected people turn into centipedic nasties. There are moments where either practical effects or more carefully designed visual ones would have been more effective.
While the movie plays like a horror, it leans more towards monstrous super-villain, hopping from body to body, as the main creature, already revealed by the poster art, acts like the big bad momma while her babies run wild. On the plus side, this buggy family makes the brother, sister, and father come together to survive.
The gore and ickiness elements are here, but never reach the stage of making you wince or feel like your skin is crawling (for me, Arachnophobia 1990, always does that), which you would expect from a movie about multi-legged bugs. Such scenes are started then cut away from too soon.
The end run involves a battle between the overly violent brother and the mother (or, to be fair, daddy) monster. Here is where the movie really kicks ass, leading to a sequelitis-ending (you know, oops-not-dead-yet!) Overall, the direction and story by Chalit Krileadmongkon and Pakphum Wongjinda keeps what could have been a very video-nasty kind of movie tightly "clean," even with the bloody bits. It moves well, but undercuts itself by giving a standard brother hates father backstory that stops the momentum at key moments, and it shies away from the intensity horrific scenes could have reached. The monster design is good and a longer battle scene would have been perfect, but still worth a watch because of its anime and manga-like vibe.
