[Film Review] Claw 2021

How do you like your monster movies? Lots of screaming and plenty of killings, or adventure and fun? There is a certain quantity of death and screaming in Claw, but for the most part this is the latter variety of monster movie. It’s a “Saturday afternoon and the hangover still hasn’t gone” type of film: light-hearted, undemanding and with some humorous moments to keep you awake.

Julia (Chynna Walker) and her probably-gay-best-friend Kyle (Richard Rennie) are on a road trip to Los Angeles where Julia is due to perform a stand-up show. Fed up with the journey and entertaining themselves with music and banter, they dodge an animal in the middle of nowhere and burst a tyre. What can they do? Of course: walk back to that ghost town they spotted and see if they can find help. Instead, they find themselves crashing for the night with friendly-but-strange Ray (Mel Mede)… but it just happens there is a hungry raptor roaming nearby and they don’t sleep too well.

The story isn’t bad: Claw has a dinosaur, a dog, a mad scientist and even a dream sequence, so it should keep the kids quiet for a bit. Walker and Rennie carry most of the film between them, alternately panicking, planning or more of the banter. Their endearing rapport works, though Rennie overdoes the camp a little sometimes; Walker is the only one whose acting ability is actually apparent through much of the film. The key problem with the characters though is that there isn’t much to them: apart from a brief part of the film where the two friends have to get past their city prejudices of ghost town Ray, there is no development and certainly no breadth to them at all.

Something tells me director and co writer Gerald Rascionato is a fan of Tremors, and I can’t help comparing Claw to the old favourite. It’s set in a small desert town, strangers band together to cope with a creature they’ve never seen before, there’s a truck that won’t start, and a nonsensical little escape attempt. There is no gore in Claw (one scene with a little blood) and in almost every respect, I’d call this Tremors-lite: fewer (and more two-dimensional) characters, a smaller creature, less cheesy humour and much less exciting. I might have been tempted to give up if it wasn’t for the engaging chemistry between the two leads.

I’ve mentioned the tone of the film, and I must say this is something I didn’t find easy to navigate. I’ve called it lighthearted, yet the experience with the raptor is declared to be “shared trauma”, the subject of both nightmares and clichéd jokes. The mood at the start of the film led me to expect comedy, but although Claw is amusing, I’d hardly call it funny. The other odd aspect was the pace of the film. It’s understandable to have a slow start, a warm-up as it were to meet the characters; and once that’s done the pace builds up just fine. But then just when there seems to be some resolution to the story, it stops, starts, stops, starts, and grinds to a credits roll over ten minutes long.

On the plus side, Claw is not ashamed of its budget limitations: an obvious point is made of using shadows behind a window or thin wall so we can tell what violence is being done rather than actually seeing it. Just as gratifying (and I bet you’ve been wondering), the raptor is a very serviceable CGI; not great, but a long way off from distractingly bad. It rarely looks “stuck on” to any scene, and is often applied carefully so that only part of the creature is visible, or only seen briefly; thus making its budget appearance less noticeable.

Considering the approximately 70 minute length, and the less than satisfactory ending, I’m inclined to think Claw could have been more effective as the pilot of a TV show about Julia and Kyle; adventures through forgotten towns, perhaps. The ending could have been remodelled to lead to another story, perhaps via a tongue-in-cheek cliffhanger. It certainly held a lot of potential.

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