Review: Creature

Creature has pretty much been universally panned. Bloggers and critics have slammed it as the worst horror movie of the year. It’s not. Not by a long shot. Personally, I don’t see what the hate is about. This isn’t a “good” movie by any stretch of the imagination. It is, however, entertaining, which is a lot more than I can say for a lot of the horror output lately. The ire may be stemming from the fact that director Fred Andrews has lashed out at the blogging community for taking a big steaming collective dump on his baby. Not a good idea for a low budget horror filmmaker to piss off the blogging community there buddy. Anyway, I’m just gonna ignore that and rate the movie based on its merits, or lack thereof.

We have a couple of ex navy seals, their girlfriends, a couple of friends, someone’s sister, hell I forget how they all fit together, let’s just say, as Joe Bob would have, we have a bunch of spam in an SUV. The spam in an SUV is driving to New Orleans when they stop for gas in the swamp. Intrigued by a local legend about a gator man, they decide to check it out. Bad idea. Lockjaw the gator-man is the real deal, and the locals worship him as a god. Chomp.

Let’s go with the bad first. The acting is, for the most part, god awful, especially Mehcad Brooks as the lead. Wow he was bad. What little gore there is isn’t very convincing. The story has logic and believability holes the size of Louisiana itself. The gator man suit is laughably dumb looking. It’s not very original, as evidenced by the gas station scene. It is a carbon copy of the one in House of 1000 Corpses, complete with a “ya’ll think us country folk are real funny like” speech and Sid Haig drawing some kids a crude map to check out a local legend.

The thing is, some of the very things that are the weaknesses of the movie are why I dug it. This flick has a refreshing old school feel. I can absolutely see this being something I would have run across in my video store prowling “5 VHS for 5 dollars” days. True, the story doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, but nevertheless it contains enough incest, strange transformations, cannibalism, swamp cults, and backwoods weirdness to keep the proceedings fun. Most of the acting is bad, yes, but it’s a goofy sub b-grade horror flick. Did I mention that it’s got Sid F’n Haig? He rules in ANYTHING. Plus, the Spiderbaby line made me laugh. No matter how bad that monster suit is, I love the fact that they went the rubber suit route rather than CGI. They also had the good sense to get nearly every female member of the cast at least topless. This does bring me to one thing I’ve noticed in movies lately. In the old days, if you went after girls to put in your movie just to be topless, you got some curvy ladies. What’s up with these meagerly endowed anorexic chicks that have taken over the genre? Now don’t get me wrong, I prefer real boobs any time, but…you know what, I get accused of being sexist on this blog enough. I’m going to stop this rant right there.

How this movie got a 1,500 screen theatrical opening I will never know. It’s a good straight to DVD level flick and that’s about it. It’s like a really good Syfy original, but made with the spirit of low budget direct to video 80’s fare. No, it isn’t technically good and yes, it’s sadly lacking in gore, but all of the other gripes are normal bad movie shortcomings. If you like bad movies, you could do a lot worse than this. After all, you have Sid Haig, gratuitous nudity, and a stupid looking rubber monster with a ridiculous backstory. I don’t know about you, but those 3 things alone are enough to get me to watch anything. One severed thumb up. Nathan says check it out.