Movie Details
| Title: | Creep | |
| Director: | Christopher Smith | |
| Year: | 2004 | |
| Genre: | Horror | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 10.07.05 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (1)
- Severance
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 10.07.05 | Alamo South Lamar | This Screening is part of event: FantasticFest 2005 Kier-la came out again to intro this midnight movie about a girl with a way-too-yellow dress running through London's sewers and subway tunnels (tube tunnels? tube tubes? who knows). She basically said that this was very similar to a British movie made in the early 70s called Death Line (AKA Raw Meat), but a lot of people thought Death Line suffered a bit from deliberate, British pacing and so Creep is basically what those people wished Death Line was. Before the movie, they played a short called Mindtrix which was basically a Geto Boys music video using Star Wars figures in stop-animation. It's about as funny as you'd expect. Creep sets itself up like a typical monster movie, where we have Franke Potente establishing her character as someone interested in doing a line of coke, tracking down George Clooney, and fucking him. Of course she happens to fall asleep while waiting for the train and wakes up after the station's locked up for the night. Cue the trying to get out, the stalking monster, and the lots of blood and screaming. A large part of this movie and my thoughts on it revolves around what I think is a fairly significant spoiler, so if you don't want anything ruined for your first viewing of Creep, my one-line synopsis is that, despite having a few issues with it, it's a very decent horror movie with a sufficient amount of blood and gore and hey, who doesn't like seeing Franke Potente running. So OK, the first few encounters with this beast are of the grab-you-in-darkness variety. We see a girl and a guy get pulled quickly into the darkness, as if from some huge lumbering beast. We also see a guy get picked up by his head and killed. We also hear high-pitched scraping yells and there seems to be some correlation between the beast and gathering rats. So... when we finally see this antagonistic force and we learn that it's not any sort of monster at all but a man-Gollum of a dude that's just lived in these tunnels his whole life, I start re-examining his super-strength and seeming control over rats. Also, the film makes a point earlier of not having any curious cases of missing people or anything like that, yet on this particular night, this freakshow guy's killing train conductors left and right; he's pretty much killing everyone but Franke Potente. So I have to wonder, if he's been living down here for years and years and years, why start with the indiscriminate killing on this particular night? He seems to have a whole system of caging and torturing victims, but we never really see any carnage from people who weren't still breathing at the beginning of the movie. I know I shouldn't be thinking at a time like this, but still... this dude has problems dragging a dead body out of a pool of water, how's he picking a guy up by his head? Other than that though, and Potente's frequent running (it must be in her contract or something, at least her hair wasn't red), there are some really nice gore scenes in this movie. One scene in particular, you see nice full gouts of blood shoot out straight at the camera. Another scene involves a gynecological examination table and a long curved rusty blade. There's also the gratuitous explanation scene with lots of distorted fetuses pickled in jars. Be on the lookout for one that looks EXACTLY like Yoda. I swear. The last shot is also pretty interesting. Franke manages to insert a little questionable doubt there in the last few frames which really makes me wonder why I think she's so hot. I mean, she doesn't have the best body, and her face isn't like super conventionally beautiful, but she is just SO hot! who knows, it's a mystery... maybe it's all the running. Random Notes: -They showed trailers for Creepshow and Night of the Creeps in front of this. I've been horrible with remembering the pre-show trailers so just assume that they are all kick-ass. Because they were. -I guess in London the sewer water is kept at a nice 80 degrees or so, at least when lead actors are swimming around there. Steam coming off the water didn't exactly sell me on the cold dankness of it. But then again, maybe the steam just meant it was "fresh" which makes it all the more urinary and disgusting. |
