Night Creature

Like many I was suckered into watching this film thinking it was a horror opus with some sort of demonic black panther (leopard?) stalking scantily clad buxom B movie bombshells through the jungles near strategically photographed Angkor-esquire ruins of Thailand. It is but it isn't, and while NIGHT CREATURE isn't a "bad" movie -- there is some camp value to be had here amongst all of the conversations, and one really good extended cat attack scene -- it doesn't have much to recommend it, aside from Donald Pleasence. Like Peter Cushing or Basil Rathbone he elevates the film beyond the dreck level just by appearing in it.

Dr. Loomis plays a novelist and great white hunter drawn to equatorial Southeast Asia who takes up the challenge to track down a rogue panther that is mauling local villagers on some sort of island/peninsula/water bound isolated location. Predictably, he freezes up at the last moment of truth when confronting the beast and is maimed for life. "Crippled" is the non-politically correct expression. Other round-eyed Caucasian relatives drop by to visit, there is intrigue and romance under the jungle canopy and next to the photogenic ruins, and at some point the panther emerges from the teeming forests to claim the only white woman in the cast. The creature must be stopped lest it ruin the local tourism business, and Dr. Loomis gets really intense, sits around glowering like a madman while knocking back the native booze & gabbering about the past, and finally lures the panther to go mano-a-mano with his wits, slamming the doors at the last second ... and then skarkers. The film concludes with the surviving Americans getting onto a boat and leaving the natives to their doom, which would have been my suggestion from day one.

Filmed in 1978, this is actually one of the "When Animals Attack" vein of thrillers made after the success of crowd-pleasers like JAWS, FOOD OF THE GODS and GRIZZLY. Here the menace is in the form of a sexy trained panther, which means only one thing: Animal rights activists will be offended by how the animal was coerced into performing for the camera. If the movie had been made today the cat would be a computer animation and Ralph Feinnes would have played the Donald Pleasence role, so we can be thankful that the movie was made when it was & by who bothered to show up: It is a forgettable little bit of 70s Saturday afternoon idiocy. It's also funny how the pivotal scenes in the film all seem to involve action being staged with the Angkor-esquire ruins looming in the background. They serve only as a set decoration, whatever relationship the panther has with the ancient traditions that erected the monuments is never delved into, and essentially this is a PG rated (made for cable?) Jungal Trash exploitation film about white people going to the jungles and having all sorts of fascinating adventures while the natives carry the luggage.

What the film needed was some sort of lurid angle that would have produced bared breasts or better yet a blasphemous native sexual rite combined with a supernatural kicker. As mentioned above there's one great scene where the cat stalks a woman amidst the ruins, the final images of Dr. Loomis sitting in the boat with the face of the panther superimposed on him were perhaps the most evocative moments in the production ... aside from an excellent monsoon sequence filmed during an actual monsoon. If it sounds like I am just not getting into the spirit of things here you are correct, the film is plodding, unimaginatively staged, derivative, cheap, and has little to recommend it aside from another unhinged Donald Pleasence performance. Perhaps the most compelling reason to acquire a copy and subject yourself to watching it is that it's completely obscure, out of print, and with no anti-animal exploitation disclaimer at the end, likely to stay that way.

4/10; Worth a look for Animal Attack fans, otherwise you might want to try NIGHT OF THE SORCERERS, at least that one has some breasts.

Perhaps I should explain that I am one of those people who are willing to sit through the most egregious crap, just to be able to hear Nancy Kwan's charming Hong Kong accent and see her fabulous zygomatic bones. But even for me, 1978's "Night Creature" was tough to get through. In this one, Nancy and a few others pick the wrong time to pop in on her dad, big-game hunter Donald Pleasence, at his private Thai island in the River Kwai. Donald has just released a preternaturally cunning and spitefully ferocious black leopard to hunt and engage in a battle of wits; a creature that wastes little time going after Nancy's half sister... Anyway, this movie is basically junk. Ineptly lensed and directed, with a weak story and little in the way of suspense, it surely doesn't offer much to the casual viewer. And the DVD in question here doesn't help. The picture is fuzzy and scuzzy, revealing a crummy and scummy 16mm print source, and the sound quality is very poor. Still, somehow, a viewing of "Night Creature" does have its compensations. Pleasence's acting is fun to watch, ranging as it does from hypermaniacal to catatonic. The film is atmospheric in parts, the Thai scenery looks nice, and Nancy Kwan looks even nicer. She is 39 in this film--18 years past her yummy Suzie Wong debut--and still looks very beautiful. Heck, she's still a looker TODAY, at 68! But even those zygomatic bones aren't enough to redeem "Night Creature." This is surely a film for Nancy Kwan completists only. Like me

Writer/race car driver/pilot/big game hunter Axel MacGregor(Donald Pleasence) has been restoring temples in Thailand when a spate of local villages are plagued by a violent panther killing and attacking the residents.

Being given every multi hyphenate job title short of superhero, Axel sets off to hunt and kill the animal. Unfortunately, his legendary brass fails him and he ends up physically mauled and severely ego bruised.

Cut to the present, where he has survived the attack with a bad leg and a worse attitude. Axel hires a local team to capture the cat, and bring it back alive to his private island residence. Rather than any of 1,000,000 logical actions...he released the animal onto the island, and plans to stalk and kill it with a rifle loaded with 9 bullets (one for each of the supposed lives a cat has in popular idiom).Public safety is apparently totally less important than repairing the damage to his mythical reputation.

As it so happens, Axel's family decides to make a once in a half decade visit just then. Idle, spoiled daughter Georgia (Jennifer Rhodes), her independent half sister Leslie (a still sexy Nancy Kwan), Georgia's small child Peggy, and Georgia's boy toy of the moment Ross(producer Ross Hagen).

Billed as a horror movie, it's actually an extremely slow moving melodrama. The extremely well trained cat is always shot in slow motion, and there's only one actual attack in between long runs of meandering dialog.

Shrill Georgia ends up the cat's first island victim(due to an ill considered search for Peggy's pet dog), and poor Peggy ends up sitting out in the rain for what seems like 3 days while a weak Ross/Leslie love story is quickly sketched in, Axel's Ahab like obsession and post death of his daughter breakdown chew the scenery (and ample location shots) to pieces, and Ross attempts to save the day while looking to be more and more like Ross Hagen writing a Mary Sue stand in for himself that's far more accomplished than he ever actually was.

Nancy Kwan is giving nothing interesting to work with,Ross Hagen is a smarmy twit, Peggy as a character is nearly forgotten about, all of the native actors are little more than the help.

Donald Pleasence's fits of overacting are the only non narcolepsy inducing moments in an otherwise indifferent film with a an allegory as awful as the final visual transition serving as a dud of an ending.

Most all of the cast had long careers as working actors, and this film is pretty much the nadir for all of them, skip it and watch a National Geographic special instead. All of the gorgeous panther tracking and location shots, far less of the boredom.

First of all, if you're writing a review and clearly don't know who Nancy Kwan is and her place in film history, you can forget pretending you know what you're talking about. That said, I agree this is not an award winning film, but it's good entertainment, which as I recall, is kind of the idea behind show business. It's a good made for TV movie, even though it was made for the SE Asia film market. At the time, and as far as can see to this day, every film had a love interest angle. This film didn't show the actual love scene, but implied it with a kiss. In the conservative SE Asian media market at the time, this is not surprising. There definitely could have been more hunting scenes, and the movie did seem hurriedly edited with a lot of choppiness from one scene to the next, but this was a budget film and not a Hollywood blockbuster. The version we see may be the one that was distributed after the Thai censors had a go at it. I don't know. All I can say is that for the $3 I paid for it, I thought it was a good movie with Donald Pleasance and Nancy Kwan, two of my favorite actors, in it. The 2 adult character actors are respected and performed well. The kid was annoying, but aren't they all? For those of you who obviously didn't exist in the 1970s, you really need a better understanding of the different culture and history of America's previous decades if you want to make commentary, and hope to make a career of it, on the films and other entertainment mediums of the time. I do recommend this film.

A voiceover accompanies and describes celebrated writer and hunter Alex MacGregor (Donald Pleasence) while he and his attendants plod through a Thai jungle during this film's opening scene, as they search for a deadly rogue black leopard that has killed numerous local villagers. Alex is attacked and savaged by the animal, and made permanently lame as a consequence, and his offer of a ten thousand dollar reward for the beast if captured unharmed is soon claimed by successful Siamese beaters, following which the hunter keeps the caged mankiller at his remote palatial home while preparing for a rematch. The purpose of this revived hunt will be for MacGregor to expunge a newly found emotion within him: fear (although his high-powered scoped rifle should be of no little assistance in that regard), and after giving his servants two weeks off with pay, loads his weapon with nine rounds (for the fabled number of lives), frees the creature and limps off alone in pursuit of it. This is an interesting notion for what promises to be a stirring tale of adventure, but then the plot shifts to Bangkok, where are found the two daughters of Alex, Leslie (Nancy Kwan) and Georgia (Jennifer Rhodes with the work's best performance), along with the latter's child, all about to embark upon a journey to pay their father a surprise call. The three females are escorted by a transplanted Texan, a tour guide in the Thai capital and a former lover of Georgia, and he becomes romantically embroiled with her sister immediately after the group's arrival at the vacated MacGregor estate, while the title character is only seen as he threatens the visitors, the big game hunter seemingly having been swallowed by the encroaching flora as he seeks his hardly elusive prey. The matter of Axel's struggle with fear becomes subordinate to his offspring's emotional entanglements, although there are many slow motion closeups of the brute to enliven the action in a film that is bedevilled with serious flaws of continuity.