Creatura

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

If you need a good laugh, here's the comedy for you.

Let's start with the characters, which are all stereotypes or over-the-top whack jobs. After 25 years of not doing anything, an escaped mutant beast finally decides to eat something, so mutilated corpses start floating to the surface on the beaches of a Caribbean island. No sea monster movie is complete without the dumb local cop who ignores a scientist's warnings about the problem. The idiot teen angst son who just keeps getting in his Daddy's hair, needs to be put on time out. Local voodoo dancers that look like they're practicing for a primal scream contest. Military with enough fire power to blast the Western Hemisphere to rubble, but if brains were dynamite, they wouldn't have enough to blow their noses.

But the best is the paranoid beach comber ex-scientist (who didn't age at all in 25 years). I love his "under the canoe" playhouse, where he stares wide-eyed at anything he sees, and whines incoherent gibberish hysterically.

There really was a decent original idea for a story, but the director throws so much extra stuff at you, it's buried under a Caribbean Sea of dead-end sub plots and meaningless banter. The story suggests an evil secret involving the creature, but instead of exploring this, you'll just see pointless padding, like the romance with an island beauty liking the knucklehead kid. The two scientists rekindling their dead marriage serves no purpose either.

I pity Craig T. Nelson, who took the thing seriously, and tried to make the most of his character. The director is to blame for the weak construction of the film which ends up being unintentionally funny. There are a few good moments involving the creature, but not enough. Most of the time you'll see the increasingly obvious red dye to simulate an attack, or the beast standing two feet away from a victim staring dumbly. Entertaining stuff, but as comedy, not horror.

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.

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 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.