Creeping Death

As I happened to stumble upon the 2023 horror movie "Creeping Death" by chance here in 2024, I opted to watch it since it was a horror movie that I had not seen before, much less actually heard about. And thus, I suppose that writer and director Matt Sampere has every opportunity to entertain and scare me with this movie.

The storyline was pretty straightforward, and while it certainly was a watchable horror movie, you're not in for a grand horror experience from writer and director Matt Sampere. The movie was, at best, a generic horror experience. Sure, I found the storyline to be adequate, but it was by no means a movie that brought anything new to the horror genre.

While I was actually not familiar with the cast ensemble in the movie, I will say that the acting performances were actually fair. They had a good ensemble of actors and actresses to portray the various characters in the movie.

Visually then the movie was okay. It was not a movie that made use of an abundance of special effects. But whatever effects were in the movie were actually fair enough and served their purpose.

If you enjoy horror movies, by all means give "Creeping Death" a chance. You might just happen to enjoy the movie a lot more than I did. There are far worse horror movies out there, so why not give this movie a fair chance?

My rating of "Creeping Death" lands on a five out of ten stars.

On Halloween night, a group of irritating twenty-somethings steal a mysterious sack from the porch of a strange old man, not realising that the contents of the bag - pieces of local dogs - are an offering to appease an ancient Celtic deity called the Aos Sí. In meddling with the age-old tradition, the obnoxious youths incur the wrath of the deity, plunging their friend Tim (played by the film's director Matt Sampere) into a night of terror.

It's bad enough that Creeping Death is clichéd, poorly written and badly acted, but add the fact that the film is so dark for much of the time that it's virtually impossible to figure out what is happening and what you have is a real test of one's patience. It's hard to be scared when straining one's eyes (or rolling them at the awful dialogue and dreadful performances). Great job in getting the film off the ground, but zero marks for originality, technical accomplishment, and overall entertainment factor.

Trying to take care of his mother, a teen finds his friends have disrupted his Halloween plans by stealing a sack of sacrificial offerings for a Celtic deity known as Aos Si which has now turned its attention to them and forces him to help stop the creature from taking them all out.

This was a generally decent if somewhat underwhelming effort at times. One of the better features here is the solid sense of atmosphere and lore attempted here incorporating the Celtic deity into the mix during the holiday season. The main idea of the deity effectively being an early purveyor of Halloween lore by offering the kind of setup that shows itself as an early setup for trick-or-treating in how people would leave sacrificial gifts for it in exchange for their safety and is a practice honored by the town that they're too self-centered to honor. With the way it works here involving the being as a figure that they anger and have it be targeting them for the remainder of the first, this setup brings about a lot of rather fun traditional revenge motifs which are woven together quite nicely bringing in the folklore of the spirit's origins to change things up. That also allows the film to ramp up the holiday aesthetic here with the usual assortment of decor and ornamentation found during the holiday, as the whole thing is littered with trick-or-treaters, lighted pumpkins, and everyone going around in their costumes before being attacked by the creature in some gruesome and graphic attacks. The look of the spirit is decent enough, but its inhuman appearance and powers make the encounters solid enough, including the necking couple outside the friend's house, the race to get away when it appears outside the group or the attack at the house where it generates some fun stalking scenes along with several great kills. There are some big issues to be had with this one. One of the main issues with the film is the sense of over-familiarity that runs wild throughout here as everything comes across as any number of similar genre efforts. Featuring an assortment of unlikable teens getting in over their heads by disrupting something and getting a supernatural act of vengeance to stalk them for their misdeeds is not as original a premise as it should be with everything here running through the same patterns a storyline like this usually dictates. By staying in such familiar realms, it doesn't do much of anything new and remains familiar and predictable as a result of the assortment of teens he's stalking the usual unlikable selection of figures in this type of film doesn't help this one much. The other big drawback with the film is the lack of explanation for why the main teen who knows about the creature and what's going on has to go through with helping the other group get away from the creature. The blackmail used to get him onto their side being friends in the past and how to help them get away with the desecration of the sacrificial offering makes no sense and putting himself in danger to help them figure out what's going on isn't well throughout. The last factor with this one is an uneven first half where there's way too much emphasis on the cancer diagnosis to give the film enough time to get much else explored or explained before getting to more traditional matters in the second half. These all manage to bring this one down overall.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language, and Brief Nudity.

With no expectations going in, I was delighted to find this movie being one of those hilariously terrible, so-bad-it's-good movies that you can laugh with and at from beginning to end.

If only there were some more gold nuggets of lines like "Do you know how to have a conversation, dude?" and "My nipples are as hard as rocks!" and "Oh no, it's face, that's a face, that's a face!" and "This is why you never got into film school, you know nothing about cinematography" (ironic!), this would be deserving of yearly rewatches in cult fashion.

Oh, and it's pretty amazing how some people created IMDb accounts just to give this one a 10 star rating and a review with remarkably high praise. So weird, right?!

No pun intended - actually I am not sure if you can say that it is steady. It is really tough to rate and review something that one has put so much heart and soul into. But as the director said, before we watched his movie on one of the biggest screens in the world, he edited this on a laptop. I don't think he could imagine the scope ... and what it does watching this on a big screen - I don't think he was aware of lighting issues or other issues (editing wise) that would arise.

But even without those you really have to suspend your disbelief ... you have to just take the flaws this throws at you (including some very bad acting and plot holes that might have been bigger than the screen we watched this on) ... if you can, maybe you'll be able to enjoy this more. But you live and learn and maybe the next effort of this filmmaker will be better.