Creature – Review

Reviews, Theatrical Reviews, Top Story

Terror has teeth?

Horror as a genre gets maligned much more than it probably ought to as a genre for a lot of reasons, most of them having to do with direct to video schlock that obscures the many good titles that come out on a regular basis. Creature is a title that takes the entire genre down with it. While it’s not the worst film of the year, far from it, it’s going to be on the outskirts looking in. If anything it has at least shown that you can make a horror monster that takes all the bad characteristics of every one-note monster to grace the silver sceen.

It has a fairly pedestrian setup. Six horny twenty-somethings taking a shortcut through Louisiana’s back woods on their way to New Orleans find out there’s more to the backwoods than gators and rednecks. Oscar (Dillon Casey) is the wiseacre, playing off his sister Karen (Lauren Schenider). Ex-Marine Randy (Aaron Hill) is a bit uptight but his girlfriend Beth (Amanda Fuller) is perhaps a bit more curious about things than she lets on. Throw in the token black guy Niles (Mehcad Brooks) and his sexpot girlfriend Emily (Serinda Swan) and you’ve got a group set up to be dead teenagers in a slasher flick.

Enter Lockjaw, a Louisiana legend. Believed in by the locals, but dismissed by the tourists as their version of Bigfoot, the six soon to be victims of the part man/part animal have to survive the night and some locals (Sid Haig) who have more to do with the creature than they let on. And it’s dreadfully awful, a relentlessly aggressive film that seems to revel in its poor quality. And while normally that’s not a bad thing, as films this bad can generally have some redeeming quality that makes them become good again, but this film shares nothing in common with any of those.

It’s a bad film that stops right before falling into the “so bad it’s good” category, ending up just being bad.

It doesn’t skimp with any gore or nudity, which is a refreshing change in a genre that has had PG-13 films become more of a staple than many aficionados of the genre would want or welcome. The problem is that both are fairly poorly done; the film’s attempt at using gore showcases its lack of a budget for it. It would’ve been more effective with better camerawork and more judicious editing; the film seems to revel in showcasing that it has no budget without any of the self-parodying that comes along with it.

This is a film that by all rights would normally have found its way direct to video but has somehow found its way into theatres, which is remarkably considering Creature is Fred Andrews’ debut as a director. A long time production designer, he’s even managed to get horror veteran Sid Haig into the mix in a throwaway roll, but he doesn’t show anything as a storyteller that would show he has a bright future as a director much less in the horror genre.

When all is said and done, people are going to look at Creature as a film that somehow made it into theatres when other films that were significantly better couldn’t.

Director: Fred Andrews
Notable Cast: Mehcad Brooks, Dillon Casey, Aaron Hill, Serinda Swan, Lauren Schneider, Amanda Fuller, Sid Haig
Writer(s): Tracy Morse, Fred Andrews