When the Trailer Promises More Than the Film Delivers
Look, I’ll be honest with you. When I first caught the trailer for Scurry, I was intrigued. The premise sounded solid: two strangers trapped underground during some kind of monster attack on the city above, forced to navigate pitch-black tunnels while something hunts them. Classic creature feature setup. The kind of thing that, when done right, can be genuinely terrifying. But somewhere between that promising trailer and the actual 96-minute runtime, something got lost in the darkness—and I don’t mean in a good, atmospheric way.
The Setup: High Concept Meets Low Budget
Scurry is the latest from Australian director Luke Sparke, who seems to be having quite the year. He’s the same filmmaker behind Primitive War, that Vietnam-war-meets-dinosaurs movie that just dropped, and honestly, I’m starting to see a pattern with his work that’s… concerning. But we’ll get to that.
The film follows two characters—a family man with everything to live for and a criminal with nothing to lose—who find themselves at the bottom of a sinkhole when the city above gets torn apart by something monstrous. They’re injured, they’ve got limited supplies, and they need to crawl through an increasingly narrow tunnel system to escape. Oh, and there are giant bug-beetle things down there with them.
On paper? Pretty solid. In execution? Well, that’s where things get murky. Literally.
The Reality: One Tunnel, Multiple Lighting Problems
Here’s the thing that became painfully obvious about twenty minutes in: this entire movie appears to be shot in what I’m fairly certain is just one tunnel. Maybe they dressed it up differently for a few scenes, changed the angle of the camera, but fundamentally, you’re watching two people crawl through the same claustrophobic space for an hour and a half. And I say “watching” generously, because 99% of this film is shot in near-total darkness.
I’m talking Zippo lighter darkness. Phone flashlight darkness. Night vision camera darkness. The kind of darkness where you’re squinting at your screen thinking, “Is that a rock or is my TV broken?” For a while, I thought maybe this was an artistic choice—you know, really putting us in the characters’ shoes, making us feel that primal fear of the dark. But after the third time I had to pause the movie just to give my eyes a break, I started suspecting this was less about atmosphere and more about budget constraints.
And listen, I get it. Horror films have a long tradition of using darkness and limited locations to build tension. The descent into claustrophobia can be incredibly effective. But there’s a difference between strategic darkness that heightens suspense and darkness that exists because you can’t afford proper lighting or to build multiple sets. Scurry increasingly felt like the latter.
The Characters: Two People Looking for an Exit (and So Was I)
The film is essentially a two-hander, featuring Jamie Costa and Emalia as our unlikely survival duo. There’s supposed to be this dynamic between them—the family man and the criminal, two people from different worlds forced to depend on each other. But here’s the problem: when you can barely see their faces for most of the runtime, and when they’re mostly just grunting and breathing heavily while crawling through dirt, it’s hard to build any real connection to them.
They encounter a third character at some point—finally, I thought, someone new to shake up the dynamic—but nope, this poor person gets eaten by the monster(s) pretty quickly. So we’re back to our duo, crawling, crawling, more crawling, occasionally finding a flashlight (which was honestly a relief because at least then I could see something).
The Monster(s): The Reveal That Wasn’t
For most of the film’s runtime, you don’t really see what’s hunting them. You hear it. You get glimpses in the night vision footage. You see the aftermath of its attacks. And honestly? That part kind of worked. The sound design is decent, and not seeing the creature kept me somewhat invested, hoping for a solid payoff.
But then comes the final monster reveal.
After all that buildup, all that crawling in the dark, all that anticipation… it just felt lame. I won’t spoil exactly what it looks like, but let’s just say that the creature effects couldn’t quite cash the check that the movie’s audio department had been writing. It’s some kind of giant bug or beetle thing, and once you finally see it in full, the mystique evaporates. Maybe if they’d kept it in shadows more, leaned harder into the less-is-more philosophy, it would’ve landed better. But they didn’t, and it didn’t.
The Luke Sparke Pattern: Big Ideas, Uneven Execution
Here’s where things get interesting from a filmmaker perspective. Luke Sparke seems to be a director with ambition—you’ve got to respect that. But both Scurry and Primitive War (which he also directed and which came out around the same time) show a filmmaker who’s working with limited resources and struggling to make those constraints work in his favor.
Primitive War, based on Ethan Pettus’s novel, has this killer premise: Vietnam War soldiers versus dinosaurs. It should be a no-brainer crowd-pleaser. Hell, when Sparke pitched it to Hollywood studios, they all passed because it was “too similar to Jurassic World.” So he made it independently and… I’m still trying to finish it. I’ve had to stop watching multiple times because, like Scurry, it just drags. The pacing is off, the characters aren’t engaging enough to carry the slower moments, and whatever energy the premise promises keeps getting lost in execution.
With Scurry, you can see the same issues. The film was written by Tom Evans, and there’s clearly an attempt to do something stripped-down and intense here. A reviewer noted that the film “makes good use of sound to invoke fear” and uses “the night vision on the video camera to see into the darkness—a useful device to keep the budget down as the effects work doesn’t have to be as” refined.
And there it is, right? That tension between artistic vision and practical limitation. Sometimes constraints breed creativity—look at the original Alien or The Blair Witch Project. But sometimes constraints just… constrain. And Scurry feels constrained in all the wrong ways.
The Bigger Picture: What Went Wrong?
Scurry currently sits at a 3.9 on IMDb, which honestly feels about right. It’s not offensively bad. It’s not unwatchably terrible. It’s just… disappointing. And that might be worse, because disappointment means there was potential that got squandered.
The film apparently got picked up by Umbrella Entertainment for distribution in Australia and New Zealand, and Signature Entertainment handled the US release. So there was industry buy-in here. Someone saw something in this project. But somewhere between concept and execution, the film lost its way in those dark tunnels.
Part of the problem is pacing. Nothing much happens in the beginning—just crawling and crawling and more crawling. The film needed either more character development to make us care about these people’s survival, or more creature encounters to keep the tension high. Instead, it sits in this uncomfortable middle ground where you’re neither emotionally invested nor on the edge of your seat.
The other part is that the limited location and lighting choices that were probably meant to heighten claustrophobia instead just become monotonous. There’s no variation, no visual interest to break up the darkness. It’s like if The Descent took place in a single, poorly-lit corridor for its entire runtime. That film worked because it used its cave system to create diverse environments and escalating danger. Scurry feels like it’s repeating the same beat over and over.
The Verdict: A Trailer That Sold a Better Movie
At the end of the day, Scurry is a B-movie that feels like it’s fighting against its B-movie budget rather than embracing it. And that’s a shame, because some of the best horror films of the past few decades have been scrappy, low-budget affairs that knew their limitations and worked within them creatively.
This film doesn’t do that. It feels like it wants to be a bigger, more expansive creature feature but got stuck with the resources for a contained thriller—and couldn’t quite figure out how to make that work. The darkness that should feel oppressive just feels cheap. The limited cast that should create intimacy just feels empty. The monster that should terrify just disappoints.
Am I glad I watched it? Sure, in the sense that I now know what I’m dealing with and can have an informed opinion. Would I recommend it? Only if you’re a completist who needs to see every monster movie that comes out, or if you’re specifically interested in Luke Sparke’s filmography and want to understand his work.
For everyone else? That trailer was probably the best version of this story you’re going to get. Sometimes that’s enough.
P.S. – I still haven’t finished Primitive War. At this point, I’m not sure I’m going to. Life’s too short to spend it crawling through dark tunnels, whether they’re in the sewers or the jungles of Vietnam. Even if there are dinosaurs.
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