Claw

I give it 4 stars for the good CGI and the good acting of the girl. The acting of all the other characters was really bad. The plot is non-existent. I mean, the preview tells you literally what it is about: two people get chased around by a raptor for an hour and half. No backstory, no drama, no complexity, and the attempts at humor were pretty bad. Sorry to the people who made it, as I know you put your heart into it, but I just did not find it to be a good movie (the girl's good acting aside).

The title CLAW is a synecdoche (a part which represents a whole, just as in JAWS (1975) the title actually refers to a shark). It refers to a prehistoric monster that was genetically re-engineered by a renegade scientist and ends up, for much of the duration of the movie, chasing a pair of comedians who made an involuntary stop at a desert ghost town.

This is brainless but fun entertainment for the right crowd. It takes neither science nor logic nor itself seriously, but that is okay because it is not meant to be a dissertation (a propos dissertation: the monster is referred to as a "raptor", short for "velociraptor", but that is actually a misidentification: none other than Michael Crichton, the author of JURASSIC PARK (1993), started a trend of giving this dinosaur which is closest to the ferocious Deinonychus the name of a Turkey-sized dinosaur, probably because it sounded cooler. Incidentally, whereas "velociraptor" means "swift robber", Deinonychus means "terrible claw"! Oh well).

I am part of the right audience because I like both movies in which people are chased by a monster (some comps I recently saw and liked: HOOKED UP (2013), where two people are chased by a ghost and DASHCAM (2021), where two people are chased by a flying zombie) and I like movies which have a ghost town as a background setting (a recent example: A TOWN FULL OF GHOSTS (2022)).

I am a very analytic person (see writing sample above) but it is good to every once a while let go and just let a silly movie be, as long as it hits the right entertainment notes, and this one does for me, mostly.

The CGI and acting are not top notch but adequate and the progression of events is entertaining, though I would have wished for a little faster pace. The music makes this film stand out from comparable low budget fare: the score is orchestral and gives the movie a little bit of a retro feel.

The ending overdoes the silliness a bit, and the 14-minute slo-mo end credits for this 80 minute movie must be some sort of an inside joke, but overall, it was not bad for a little over an hour entertainment. That is, if you like a movie that is just showing some people being chased by a monster against an unusual setting.

With a couple of good actors this could be an ok movie.

Based on the actual quality of the movie and the writing, probably only 3 or 4 stars. Based on how much I enjoyed myself, 10 stars. So, split the difference.

I've watched movies with much higher production that took themselves far too seriously, and thus were worse than Claw. This movie was a bunch of people having fun, with a silly little story and some good humor.

Definitely not for everyone. More of a cult comedy thing, where you shouldn't take any of it serious and should just sit back and not think for an hour.

I guess it was the intention to make this an ironical, tongue-in-cheek horror parody. Well, it's definitely all done with enthusiasm, and "sympathetic" is the word that constantly popped up in my mind while watching. But it was a bit too ambiguous for my taste. For a horror comedy it simply doesn't have enough horror, like serious jump scares or gore or even a basic building-up of the suspense. And for a comedy the humor was too dorky. I guess you could call it camp, but even then it didn't get enough substance to keep you interested throughout.

Another problem was that, after the first confrontation with the prehistoric raptor (done with simple looking CGI), the story didn't get any deeper or more multilayered; for the rest of the (very short) movie the raptor just kept roaring and chasing, while the main characters kept frantically running around to escape it. Chynna Walker and Richard Rennie act fine and they are funny enough, with some witty dialogues and ad-libs, but that's simply not enough to make a good and involving movie.