Créature

From the author of Jaws comes this so, so tale of a military experiment that splices the DNA of a human and a Great White shark.

Yes, predictably the resulting uncontrollable beastie eventually gets loose and subsequently goes about terrorising a small beach side community.

Craig T. Nelson and the ever sexy Kim Cattrall headline and equate themselves well in their respective roles whilst the rather splendid shark creature is supplied by the fx genius of Stan Winston (who was also responsible for the wonderful looking Pumpkinhead).

A fairly run of the mill affair overall, this does nonetheless contain a fair number of exciting scenes to lift it above the average mark although the ending it has to be said is sadly a particular let down!

Final verdict? Fellow fans of aquatic beastie films could certainly do a lot worse than to give this a go.

I'm a sucker for monsters, so I decided to check out the first part of this mini-series, and I was marginally impressed. There were intelligent performances from the principles, despite the alteration of the original book's interesting WW2 origins of the creature, their limited dialogue and the stock disbelieving authority figure and local slimeball characters that show up in every other creature feature. Kim Cattrall is not only visually very pleasing, but she is a very skilled actress - hopefully part 2 will allow her to do more than the usual for a woman in a horror movie. As a rehash of a 50's creature-feature I found this fun, but not too taxing on the brain. Stan Winston's creature was nicely designed, but the scale White Shark puppet was incredible (speaking from the point of view of someone with zoological training)! Our titular Antihero moves nicely, though is still a bit too Black-Lagoon-ish. I knew the legs would be there, but I didn't expect them to grow in 20 seconds flat! My hopes are high, but this post-modern prometheus can only get worse when the army show up. I just hop e the Creature puts up a fight. So far, just for rubber work and nostalgic feelings, I'll give it 6 out of 10.

I recommend doing several loads of laundry, and then folding it while watching this movie. I actually don't mean that in a bad way. It is a mildly entertaining, if overly long, 3 hours or so.

As you can tell from the very mixed reviews, whether one likes this movie might depend on your mood and your willingness to suspend disbelief and take Creature on its own terms. As other reviewers have noted, this is Peter Benchley ripping off himself in subpar manner. On the other hand, the creature is kind of cool, there are some really nifty sets, including abandoned tunnels, abandoned laboratories, abandoned military facilities, foggy swamps, and mysterious, shark tooth-shaped Islands silhouetted against the full moon, and for the most part the acting is more than adequate. Taking it for what it is, I would give it 5 1/2 or 6 Stars.

Note, regarding the DVD: As of this writing, 2019, Amazon was selling a 2-disc DVD set released by Olive Films, for around $12. The picture is excellent, surprisingly detailed and crisp, and presented in the original 1:78 widescreen. The sound is also very clear. Unfortunately, and unforgivably, there is no closed captioning. Not surprisingly, there are no special features. I do like the fact that it is presented with parts 1 and 2 each on its own DVD (labeled Night 1 and Night 2, which is kind of neat), so compression ratios are fine. I also appreciated the fact that they presented each part in its entirety, including opening and closing credits, unlike, for instance, the commonly found DVD release of Salem's Lot, which eliminated closing credits of part 1 and opening credits of part 2, combining it into one feature.

The source material of this TV movie is a novel called White Shark. It was a failure when published since the public thought it was about a great white shark, instead of what it was, namely a crazed tale about a Nazi experiment re-awakened. The novel's plot played like the movie Shock Waves, but gorier and loopier. It was a great read thanks to Peter Benchley's storytelling ability. It was nothing if not a wonderful guilty pleasure that would have made a great movie had they filmed it straight...

...The problem was the producers couldn't leave well enough alone and decided to take a grade Z plot line that worked because of the authors skill, and change it so that it was a grade Z plot line in the hands of a grade Z writer and director. The result is a laughably bad over long movie that has a laughable but cool monster and little else. This is a movie to get drunk and make fun of. Its a so good its great film, or would be except its way way too long.

I knew when I first started to look at this, that I would probably compare it to "Jaws" pretty much from the begining. I wasn't wrong. As others here have said there are a lot of similarities here.

Yet, it started out as a decent monster flick but became worse by every minut. Add the fact that the "creature" looks ridiculously stupid and you have it.

Nothing that haven't been seen before.

4/10

Movie-Man