Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Into the Dark: Crawlers’ on Hulu, in Which Everyone’s Green on St. Patrick’s Day, Even the Space Aliens

The St. Patrick’s Day episode of Into the Dark — Blumhouse-via-Hulu’s monthly horror anthology — is all about Leprechaun-themed Irish mythology. No it’s not! It’s about college kids getting plastered, which we all know is the TRUE meaning of St. Patty’s Day. Sometimes, this holiday-themed series has something to say. Other times, it just tries to amuse us. So which is it this time — social commentary or bloody laughs?

INTO THE DARK: CRAWLERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Shauna (Giorgia Whigham) is a drug dealer and a conspiracy-theorist wacko, but don’t mistake her for an untrustworthy narrator. She bookends this episode via her video diary, introducing it with some blah blah about a meteor that crashed near her smallish college town in the late ’70s. Flash back a few days: It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and students are drinking and partying and drinking and puking and soon will be drinking and getting the crap killed out of them. A rookie cop happens upon a typical rowdy bunch of plastered-to-the-wall kids, but one dude who appears to be passed out in the road is actually laying in wait to sink his teeth into whoever passes by, allowing him to become his victim’s doppelganger. I hate when that happens.

Not too far away, Misty (Pepi Sonuga) has summoned the courage to go out. She recently was roofied by some frat creeps, and she doesn’t remember what happened. Understandably, she’s a bit traumatized, and leery of these types of social gatherings, but she wants to reconnect with her bestie Chloe (Jude Demorest) and her new pal Yuejin (Olivia Liang). The three of them hang out a little despite some who’s-Chloe’s-BFF tension; Shauna shows up to deliver some Adderall; for some reason, Misty spots Chloe sidling up to one of the frat jackholes, which she would only do if she was maybe an alien doppelgänger, right? Nah, too far-fetched.

Only Shauna certainly believes this loony theory, since she has long asserted that something wacky happened in this bullshit town after the meteor hit. Chloe and/or Chloney (get it?) disappear(s), so Shauna, Yeujin, Misty and one of the frat cretins who claims to be not like the other frat bastards try to get to the bottom of this. Will there be lunacy and guts and explosions? Count on it.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Any alien-takeover doppelgänger movie is going to bring to mind Invasion of the Body Snatchers in its many forms. Crawling also desperately wants us to recall ’80s cult-horror junk we saw on USA Up All Night when Rhonda Shear was host, but it frankly lacks the creative cache to do more than throw some synths on the soundtrack and pretend to be a Carpenter wannabe.

Performance Worth Watching: Whigham appears to be the only cast member interested in giving her character any color or verve. Too bad that character never transcends silly stereotypes.

Memorable Dialogue: “People always think it’s zombies,” Shauna narrates as we witness, for the first time, an apparent human biting a gory chunk out of a real human. “But they have a totally different pathology.”

Sex and Skin: Just one frat shithead in his briefs with a big oozing wound on his leg.

Our Take: Some Crawlers stats: 0.75 jump scares, five principals, 1.43 actual characters, 0.23 of an idea, 17 percent of the chutzpah of a Cronenberg movie, a budget of roughly $437.22, too many cringeworthy end-credits bloopers. Add it up, and you’ve got one hell of a loitering time-waster of an Into the Dark entry — one of the worst, on par with Uncanny Annie in its lack of ambition. It looks very, very cheap, and exists in a dull no-man’s-land between self-satire and referential ’80s homage, never committing to an engaging style or tone. It manages to cram about 20 minutes of material into 82 minutes, cutting it up with Shauna’s “witty” narration over dumb freeze-frame shots. We’d forgive the choppy flow if the movie was original, clever, funny or insightful, but it’s rarely any of these things.

It also wastes a potentially amusing and provocative character dichotomy: Shauna can’t get anyone to buy her cockamamie space-alien theories, and Misty’s faces a similar struggle in getting others to believe she was likely date-raped. Believe women! But the screenplay is far too lazy to engage in any meaningful commentary, or even to render the film a satisfying revenge fantasy. Modern feminism deserves — and demands! — a more rigorous rendering of characters and context, and the slapdash approach of Crawlers borders on tastelessness.

Also worth noting, Crawlers features exactly zero people or things crawling. Maybe that’s a joke too?

Our Call: SKIP IT. An ’80s homage should be a guilty pleasure, but I was bored out of my gourd.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Into the Dark: Crawlers on Hulu