In the beginning, there was poo. And there were men in the poo. The men smelled the poo, and they smelled that it was bad. And then something got them. But we don’t know what yet, because that would be spending your nickel before its time, wouldn’t it?
So we meet Kate, a happenin’ London party girl who’s on a mission. Seems she’s gotten hold of some information regarding the partying whereabouts of George Clooney, and is going to go work her feminine pimpin’ wiles.
Against nearly impossible odds, she manages to fall asleep on a subway platform and misses her train. When she finally wakes up, the last train is pulling in, and she’s the only one on. Well, the only one except for Guy, her obnoxious, coke-snorting co-worker. Seems the Devil’s own dandruff has given Guy a bit of a boner for Kate, and he tries to rape her, but is dragged out of the subway car by something unseen.
She gets out of the train, chased by the mystery assailant, and meets Jimmy and Mandy, two homeless heroin addicts who live in one of the subway’s maintenance ducts. They try to help her out, but the invisible stalker picks them off, captures Kate, and dumps her in one of a series of semi-submerged cages deep in the abandoned tunnels that he has made his lair. Except he’s not invisible anymore, is he? No, he’s some kind of sewer-dwelling albino cannibal mutant, who, depending on the shot, sometimes has scraggly white hair and is sometimes bald. I’d like to think that this is a result of bad lighting, but who knows.
Also in the cages is George, one of the sewer workers from the opening scene. And his name is George because it’s funny and ironic because Kate was going to meet George Clooney. Except it isn’t really all that funny.
She and George escape the cages and the clutches of the creature again and again, running through endless, identical tunnels, until at last it kills George before Kate shoves it in front of a subway car.
You goddamn people need to start learning how to pace your movies. They don’t all have to be 90+ minutes long, y’know. Like Malorie said while we were watching this, I wouldn’t mind renting a movie that was only an hour long, but was really good, as opposed to a movie that’s 90+ minutes long, but only had enough good ideas to fill an hour. There were two separate times where Kate had her stalker at her mercy, but instead of killing him, she just ran away. Lesson to all budding filmmakers, DO NOT MAKE YOUR CHARACTERS ACT UNNATURALLY STUPID TO ADVANCE THE PLOT OR YOUR AUDIENCE WILL BE VERY FUCKING ANGRY WITH YOU. Seriously, unless we’re watching a Friday the 13th flick, we don’t want to see that shit. Easiest way in the world to absolutely destroy an audience’s sympathy for a character is to make them act like a moron when they should be kicking ass (or by making them act like the stupid, whiny douche fuck cowboys in shit-ass Brokeback Mountain).
And what was accomplished by these scenes of Kate being a dumbass? Why, to give the characters more time to run around in identical-looking sewer tunnels doing exactly what they were doing before! Granted, the inner workings of abandoned subway tunnels are about as scary a setting for a horror movie as you could ask for, but very rarely can a set maintain an atmosphere of dread simply by existing on camera. You have to plan and pace your movie according to the strengths of your script and locations. Having people running around in what is easily one of the most terrifying settings imaginable to be lost in will eventually lose all its atmosphere and just become boring if you make the audience look at it too long, and that’s exactly what Creep does. Remember, less is sometimes better. At one point in the flick, I accidentally sat on the TV remote without realizing it, and the movie was plunged into darkness, but sound kept coming out of the surround speakers. As this happened at a point in the movie where it would not only be logical, but absolutely genius to have this happen in the flick itself (like the shark attack sequence in Open Water), we thought nothing of it for nearly five minutes. Then we realized that the director was nowhere near as brilliant as we thought he was, and in fact my ass had been responsible for this little nugget of fried gold the entire time.
My next problem with Creep is the medical experiment subplot. I love movies where nothing is explained. I think it’s creepy as hell to just let the audience fill in with their own imagination the twisted, fucked-up conditions that could bring about a deformed albino cannibal homeless guy living in the London subway. But you can’t intimate that he was a product of some covert medical conspiracy and never say anything more about it! That’s just lazy writing, goddammit! This is total Chekov’s Law of Guns shit here. If you’re going to go to the trouble of introducing something like that, it’s your responsibility to explore it and give us the scoop. I was tempted to watch the director’s commentary before returning the DVD to the video store, but I have the distinct feeling that instead of an explanation I’d get some sort of self-congratulatory bullshit on how cool he thought the med lab set was or some stupid crap like that.
Seriously, we didn’t need that stuff, and seriously, fuck you for thinking we did. Chop out half an hour of retarded and unnecessary running through tunnels and all the unexplained horseshit about the medical experiments, and what you’re left with is basically C.H.U.D. meets Alien. Instead, what we’re left with is half a really good movie and half a really goddamn stupid bunch of clichés that were tired twenty years ago.
At least they had the good sense to let the puppy survive at the end. There’s a scene beginning the final battle that makes you think the puppy dies. Shitty characters, bad plot, crap dialogue, whatever, there is no quicker way to make me hate the fuck out of your movie than by killing the puppy. A movie must be both unbelievably awesome and have a very very VERY good reason for killing the puppy for me to even want to sit through the rest of it let alone enjoy it after the puppy is gone.
The Moral of the Story: Leave the puppy alone or I will kick your ass.
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