by Thomas Willett
11:00pm PST, September 14, 2011
Writer Tracy Morse has seen a lot of horror movies. Why else would he write with so many lifts from classics like Creature from the Black Lagoon and Friday the 13th? To say that hewrote Creature is as an insult to the craft. His work has the fluency of Mad Libs with the blanks filled in with the silliest words. Even then, this movie is a shining example to counter argue that everyone has a story to tell.
On their way to New Orleans, a group of 20-somethings stop by a run down, backwards town in Louisiana where there’s vicious animals in the lake and mentally deficient hillbillies running tourists shops. After discovering the history of a haunted house, the gang heads out to visit it. There are plenty of jump scares followed by a plethora of second-hand insults, proving this cast probably was kidnapped in a Home Depot parking lot and forced to film together with no chemistry.
As the night goes on, the gang sets up camp and enjoys the night life. At some point, everyone is drunk, every girl is topless, and the hillbillies (lead by Sid Haig) violently try to persuade the gang to stop lusting with their kin. It's a typical set up, but by the end, the film is so devoid of common sensibilities that the half man/half alligator known as Lockjaw is not even the worst thing.
The story progresses and becomes complicated by taking the monster premise and adding subplots of incest, violent hillbillies, and other ideas that clog the flow of its 93 minute runtime. It feels like Morse got bored with one set of tropes and decides to attack another, resulting in a mess where an emotional tone is never formed and the scary parts aren’t even a fun kind of terrible. It’s hard to figure out what is meant by the writer’s vaguely described scene changes. The hillbillies are too desensitized and stupid, the 20-somethings too typical, and Lockjaw is just as confused as the audience is.
Besides Morse, director Fred Andrews does his best to take what was so great about Friday the 13th and apply terrible layers of camera work to it. In the final showdown between Lockjaw and survivor Niles (Mehcad Brooks), the camera plays against the needed intensity. Fought in the mud, the camera manages to shoot every scene very slow and in a low grade visual style, allowing every fuzzy detail to reveal itself, including the terrible costume work. If anything, it also helps to show Andrews’ inability to have consistency in tone, going from pointless jump scares to slow motion, poorly choreographed fighting.
Creature is a frustrating movie to watch because it never shows potential. It tries to win on tropes and incest twists that come across as asinine. Nothing substantial is built up to make the ending matter. No character, with exception to Grover (Pruitt Taylor Vince, playing a stupid hillbilly with a Redd Foxx accent) sounds authentic. While this town may seem backwards and scary, there is no believability that it could’ve functioned prior to this story.
The movie fails where Slither succeeded. That film tackled monster movies with violence, but also managed to have an authentic voice with a band of characters that, despite being pretty hollow, were fun to be around. None of Creature’s characters have that charm. The plot lacks the nudging fun to at least realize how ridiculous this it is. Everyone seems bored. In a time when Piranha is popularizing the boobs and gore genre, Creature is helping to keep it from achieving respect.
Probably the most insulting aspect comes from the distributors, the Bubble Factory. By this point, the movie has gained notoriety as the worst opening on 1,500 screens. While they may have intentionally avoided marketing because of its quality, it didn’t deserve to open on that many screens. It’s more frustrating to see this influence public masses about independent movie releases, halting possible success stories for Tucker and Dale vs. Evil or Attack the Block, which have already garnered enough respect for a wider audience. However, ifCreature will prove anything, it’s that a few bad eggs are going to spoil the success of others.
At most, this should’ve been a straight-to-DVD release. If the six people per screening average cared to see it, they would’ve been fine just renting it from Netflix. Creature proves that it doesn’t take a budget to fail at making compelling cinema. There are hacks on every salary, and Tracy Morse and Fred Andrews are superbly hacky. The only sympathies to be given are to the cast, who have to live with this on their resume. They’ll probably get better with acting just by pretending this never happened.
Comments
Post a Comment