CREEPY CRAWLY (2022) (Well Go USA Blu-ray Review)

CREEPY CRAWLY (2022) 

aka THE ONE HUNDRED 

Label: Well Go USA
Region Code: A

Duration: 91 Minutes 57 Seconds 
Rating: Unrated
Audio: Thai 2.0 and 5.1 DTS-HD MA with Optional English Subtitles 
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen 
Director: Chalit Krileadmongkon & Pakphum Wongjinda
Cast: Chanya McClory, Pirat Nitipaisalkul [AKA Mike Angelo], Benjamin Joseph Varney

An ancient centipedal creature from Thai folklore arrives in the city during the COVID-19 pandemic, invading the lives of a group of disparate people who must quarantine for two weeks at the Srichanphen Hotel run by a scummy manager and it's creepy staff. The quarantining guests include sibling YouTubers Fame (Chanya McClory) and Phil, plus the angsty Leo, his sister Lena and their deaf father. The place is pretty sketch from the get-go, but it doesn't take long for things to get even stranger when the giant hundred-legged monster starts possessing the bodies of the hotel's guests. 

I found this Thai creature-feature to be a bit dull at it's worst and a pretty standard one and done at it's best, with a cast that is decent with some family melodrama by way of the bickering siblings and the cynical Leo, whose family struggles to remain close following the traumatic death of his mother years earlier, which has caused a divide between he and his father. The isolated location inside a quarantine hotel is pretty decent and well-lit and filmed with some solid moments of claustrophobia and ickiness when 1000's if the creature's centipede minions start pouring into the building and attacking the guests, but I struggled to care about the characters and what was happening to them. 

As the creature begins to take root hiding within the staff and quarantining guests people start disappearing, acting odd, and before you know it thousand of centipedes are crawling around the hotel attacking people, and since the scumbag proprietor of the hotel has locked all the entrances/exits there's no way out - there's nothing left to do but face it head-on, which is the best stiff in the film. When the creature emerges from it's hosts, at first partially revealing itself by unleashing a deadly sharp-tentacle type appendage from the body of it's host, which feels very The Thing-like when it happens, and then later fully emerging from the host as a huge ugly-ass centipede monster, which actually looks pretty cool, the effects are pretty sharp looking int his one. Unfortunately there's not enough of an actual compelling story to make me care about the human characters and what happens to them, or why the creature is seemingly so attracted to Fame in particular, plus a lot of it just doesn't make sense at the end of the day, with a creature mythology that is woefully undefined. Also, there's a prologue and  an epilogue that just feel tacked-on to stretch out the run time to get it to a proper feature-length. It was a one and done for me, despite the creature being pretty cool-looking there's just not much else to this that makes me want to recommend it, nothing about it stands out. 

Audio/Video: The flick is presented in 1080p HD widescreen and looks sharp and well-defined, colors look good and it's shot digitally so there are no source related film defects to contend with. Audio comes by way of uncompressed Thai with optional English subtitles. There are no extras other than a handful of Well Go USA Trailers, the single-disc release arrives in a standard keepcase with a single-sided sleeve of artwork. 

Special Features:

- Well Go USA Trailers: Creepy Crawly (2:08), Gangnam Zombie (1:42), Forgotten Experiment (2:28), Bad City (1:52)

Screenshots from the Well Go USA Blu-ray: