The Schlock Vault: Crabs!

A gleefully goofy horror/comedy that embraces its low-budget, schlocky roots as residents of a beachside town are terrorized by irradiated crustaceans.

Sometimes there’s nothing you want more than a crude, lewd and low-budget horror flick that’s as much about the yuks as the sprays of blood and goo. And “Crabs!” — don’t forget the exclamation point! — is exactly that.

In the peaceful seaside town of Mendocino — think of a junky, down-market version of Amity Island from “Jaws” — people are having their faces eaten off by horseshoe crabs that were irradiated by the collapse of a nuclear plant. Of course, they’re nearly oblivious to this fact until more than halfway through the movie, content to go about their daily lives of smoking weed, getting drunk and canoodling.

Things start off on a high note, with the very first scene being a young couple doing it cowgirl style right on the beach. Personally, I’ve never understood the appeal of such activity, it seeming like particles would get into all sorts of undesired nooks & crannies.

Interestingly, rather than going with the more conventional crab species with two big claws and eyestalks, writer/director Pierce Berolzheimer chose horseshoe crabs as his deadly critters. I guess it works to an extent because they’re vaguely threatening and mysterious, the entire body covered by a bumpy shell with a large, scary-looking stinger tail in back.

I expected our young couple to get viciously perforated with that tail, but the crabs’ preferred attack M.O. is actually to spring through the air and attach to the victim’s face, much like the “bug” version of the creatures from “Alien” and its thousands (seems like) of sequels.

Later, we’ll see larger, more toothsome versions as the killer crabs evolve into a higher state of deadliness.

Dylan Riley Snyder is the lead as Philip , a young genius inventor who uses a wheelchair for some unnamed disability. He’s been working on a exoskeleton to help him walk with the assistance of his best-friend-with-benefits-awaiting, Allie (Maddy Menrath).

Lately he’s acquired a tiny bluish energy generator, the imorium clustergram — “not the imorium clustergram!” — to power his gizmo. It’s capable of burning holes in the door of his laboratory garage, so take a wild guess if that’ll come to bear against the conniving crustaceans down the road.

Philip’s older brother, Hunter (Bryce Durfee), is the local sheriff’s deputy, though he seems to spend most of his time playing video games and tokin’. His patrol vehicle is a revved-up old Mustang, probably his personal vehicle. He takes his cues from the sheriff, Flannigan (Robert Craighead), who seems like a hippie type who fought the Man and then decided to become him, or at least a laid-back version.

Hunter finds himself falling for Allie’s mom, Annalise (Jessica Morris), a science teacher at his old high school, where Philip and Allie now attend. She’s impossibly hot and flirty for a small-town school teacher, and has no compunction about hooking up with one of her old students.

Very much a horror film type of gal.

Things go about as you’d expect. The crabs munch more and more people, eventually making an appearance at the school dance for a frenetic free-for-all that reminded me of the final scene of 1982’s “Zapped!”, maybe because it also has punctuation in its title. Things build up to an unlikely but gleefully cheesy kaiju-vs.-machine showdown.

Spicing things up is Radu (Chase Padgett), a foreign exchange student from some unnamed Eastern bloc country. He speaks in a helium-pitch falsetto via mangled English, sort of Yoda meets Borat. “Shut your dirty chairface!” he yells at Philip at one point.

I admit I couldn’t stop laughing at Radu’s antics, obvious “comic relief guy” mold as they are. Padgett has great fun with the character, even if he looks way too old to be in high school. (Not to mention resembling Dwight Shrute’s kid brother.)

Though again, this would slide right in with standard horror movie M.O., which typically feature actors pushing 30, or even past, while purportedly acne age.

(Make sure to stick around for the credits, blessed with a Radu original song, that makes mirthful use of the rhyme between “lamp” and “damp.”)

“Crabs!” is goofy, low-rent entertainment for people who like their horror movies funny, schlocky and very, very moist.