Fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000, rejoice: the movie you’ve been waiting for all year has finally arrived. There have been some stinkers this year, ranging from the stupid to the disappointing…and I’ve sat through a few of them myself…but I don’t think there is one so far that has been this bizarre, this off-kilter, this so miraculously incompetent. This is a film of such epic badness that it transcends into the realm of grand spectacle. Like Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, I cannot recommend this film to be seen by the masses, but at the same time this train wreck will attract stragglers wondering what all the fuss is about. Creature, my friends, is the pinnacle of pure bad cinema that movies like Shark Night 3D are too clever to avoid. It makes the editing in Transformers: Dark of the Moon look like the work of genius. Heck, even Beastly had a plot that you could follow.
What story there is plays like Uwe Boll had a fever dream of House of 1000 Corpses…a bunch of young friends are going to party down in New Orleans, but get sidetracked into the creepiest convenience store this side of Deliverance, populated by Chopper (Sid “Captain Spaulding” Haig) and a variety of weirdos. While there, the head of the “victims,” Oscar (Dillon Casey) sees an ad to visit the abandoned house of Grimley, now known as Lockjaw (Daniel “Future War” Bernhardt), a local swamp legend that is half-man, half-gator (explained in an origin scene as being both grotesque and hysterically awful). So, they all get there, and…well, decide to not go in, but instead camp outside for the night. That’s when Lockjaw finally strikes, and in a series of twists, it’s revealed that, surprise, Chopper and the other locals are fully aware of his ravenous doings. Thus, what began as a simple party trip becomes a struggle to survive both Lockjaw’s wrath and the odd customs practiced by the locals.
Oh, boy, where to begin? All right, let’s start with what is good. Sid Haig is awesome. Of what dialogue that’s comprehensible (much of the weird denizens of the swamp speak with such a deep, many times phony, Cajun patois that you understand maybe every 73rd word they say), the best goes to him. On top of that, the admittedly decent creature design pales in comparison to the terrifying sight of Haig wearing a white tanktop, letting his gut hang out, and basically playing up every horror movie part he’s ever had. Also, the main group of “heroes” looks good on camera, and the choice of survivors is actually pretty interesting.
Then there’s the rest of the movie. Almost from the very beginning (in which a woman goes skinny-dipping in full frontal nudity for the sole purpose of getting the movie a solid R rating), the proceedings are handled so clumsily that every frightening moment is laughable and every attempt at comedy misfires so horribly that it makes the scene uncomfortable to watch. At least three dialogue scenes go on for so long, with no visible point to them other than to increase the running time past 90 minutes, that I began thinking director Fred Andrews told the actors to think of a reason why they were doing this scene, then turned on the camera and let them say whatever they wanted. Adding insult to injury, it also seems that one of these scenes began filming before the actors knew what they were going to do, as they spend a full minute staring around the trailer they’re in, not saying anything. These scenes were then put into the film as-is with no edits deemed necessary. That’s just idle speculation on my part, but it certainly makes more sense than assuming director Andrews filmed these with planning and care and decided they were just too important to let go of in the editing process.
Character motivations also make no sense. A big twist revealed in the middle of the film helps explain why Oscar knows so much about Lockjaw in the first place, but makes no sense based on absolutely every other event leading up to that scene. Niles (Mehcad Brooks) leaves his girlfriend behind in the worst possible place because he doesn’t want her to get hurt…and this is after she tells him it is a bad idea to leave her there. Even Lockjaw’s random killings make no sense, even more so after you realize what he’s really been after all along.
Sid Haig in Creature.
And then, just throw in the fact that, sometimes when somebody has a low budget, they still don’t know what to do with it. While the sets aren’t bad (of the five or so that don’t take place in random spots in the woods, they are put together well), there are signs of sloppiness all over the place. Gore is practical, but most of the violence happens off screen. The monster suit is perpetually kept in the dark so the audience can’t see that it’s mouth controls are only hooked up about half the time. A backwoods character called Grover (Pruitt Taylor Vince) exists solely to reach into a swamp for a chip bag while being attacked by stock footage of an alligator (no, I’m not kidding). A character is shot in the thigh, but then spends the rest of the movie sprinting through the woods, cracking necks, and jumping into ten foot deep pits with nary a problem (apparently after another character asked him, “Are you okay?” he really was).
Yet, this horrid mix of cheapness, incompetence, and incomprehensible story mixes into a gumbo of something approaching a work of art. It is a very rare film indeed that can elicit the exact opposite reaction of what it was trying to get (most notably the laugh riot that ensues when Haig pops out of the woods and cold-cocks one of the female leads when we’re supposed to be startled and terrified), and it does so in the most delightfully horrible way possible. Make no mistake…this movie is bad. It is not a film to recommend to friends and neighbors. However, it is the sort of film that will find a true cult following. This isn’t the “guilty pleasure” type movie that even the most derided slasher/monster films fall into, like, say, Van Helsing or An American Werewolf in Paris. No. This is legend. This is the kind of bad movie that budding film directors point to and say, “Well, at least I didn’t make that.”
Connoisseurs of the very worst, the very creme de la crap, Creature is a movie you won’t want to miss…at least, when it comes to the home market. For the more normal among you, stay away from Creature as if your life depended on it.
Seth Paul
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