Claw is a horror comedy film that stars Chynna Marie Walker and Richard Rennie, and is co-written by Joel Hogan and Gerald Rascionato, the latter also directed the film.
Julia (Chynna Marie Walker) and her friend Kyle (Richard Rennie) are on a road trip to Los Angeles because Julia has an important stand-up comedy show to perform. But while on the way, they get a flat tyre. After an unsuccessful attempt at hitchhiking, they walk to a ghost town that they had previously passed with the hopes of finding help. In the ghost town they meet Ray (Mel Mede) who cannot assist with their flat tyre until the following morning, so he suggests that Julia and Kyle stay the night. But they don’t trust Ray, as they think that he will try to kill them. The two soon find out that they have something bigger to worry about, and that is when they are hunted by a dinosaur.
As you can probably imagine, this is an independent film, and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. In fact, the film does include some silly but funny one-liners and although the script isn’t particularly well written and the acting isn’t fantastic, there is a certain charm and a sense of fun that makes Claw hard to dislike.
The visual effects looked surprisingly good when it came to the dinosaur. There are some moments where it does look obviously fake but given that this film would have been made with a limited budget, I think that this is alright, all things considered. With that being said, I didn’t care much for the way the film ended, which felt overdone and unsatisfying.
Normally, I wouldn’t feel the need to mention the end credits for a film but the end credits for this film move at a snail’s pace and take up over ten minutes of the eighty-minute duration of this film. This was obviously done to make the film’s run time longer, but I wish that director Gerald Rascionato had included some more bloopers over the end credits or something else, so it wasn’t nearly so frustratingly intentionally long and tedious.
Claw is an indie horror film that is surprisingly good for what it is and, in all honesty, if the film had a better ending and shorter end credits, then it could have been a better film that it probably deserved to be.
Claw is out now on DVD and Video on Demand in Australia. The film is available on iTunes, Telstra TV Box Office, Google Play, YouTube, and Fetch TV.