The students in a small coastal town are preparing for their Prom night, but a danger is coming from the sea in the form of some bloodthirsty horseshoe crabs. One kid not looking forward to partying is Phil McCalister (Dylan Riley Snyder), a scientific genius who’s a wheelchair user and is trying to invent a contraption to enable him to walk. His girlfriend Maddy (Allie Jennings) and Radu (Chase Padgett), a foreign student with an offensively exaggerated accent and ‘comical’ mannerisms, might be the only people who can save the town.
The debut feature for writer/director Pierce Berolzheimer, Crabs! aims for Tremors-style fun and action, but while it delivers on the fun gore also has some woeful CGI (but even that probably works in its favour). There’s massive potential here for a cult following, but not necessarily for the right reasons. It’s likely it might contain the best Prom massacre since Carrie, but there are also homages to plenty of beloved monster classics and a bar scene ripped straight from Gremlins. The humour is crass and the story’s over the top, particularly when it comes to what we’ll call the ‘MacGyver’ moment, but even that is surpassed by the ridiculous climax.
Crabs! is preposterous in the same way The Asylum and Troma movies are. If you can get over the offensive stereotypes and take it in the spirit in which it was no doubt made, you could have a lot of fun.
