Criatura

While I'm not sure what I expected going into this, I didn't really get what I was looking for. I think I was hoping for something a bit more like Hatchet which was a ton of fun and had quite a bit of gore. This movie feels like it's just a step above a Syfy channel movie. If you've ever had the misfortune of stumbling upon one of those without expecting it, you'll know what I mean.

I liked the slight throwback to 80's era movies what with the camping, one-by-one killing, and somewhat gratuitous nudity. Everything else was pretty bland. The creature effects are OK, but not fantastic. The effects in general, really, are just OK. Then there's the suspension of disbelief which is just a bit more than I can handle (aside from the monster stalking the swaps of Louisiana). I won't go into why exactly, but it's just a mess. The movie isn't terrible, but it's certainly not anything that's going on your favorites list.

I've always been a fan of blood, gore and guts. I would watch anything that fell under the genre of Horror. I've seen all the Friday the 13ths, Nightmare on Elm Streets, and Halloweens; I've seen all the Jeepers/Creepers, Texas Chainsaw Massacres, and Saws; and I've watched most of the classic Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman, Invisible Man and Creature from the Black Lagoon movies. Some of my all-time favorite Horror films have been the less mainstream films though; such as Killer Klowns from Outer Space and the cult classic Evil Dead. When I was asked if I was interested in passes to see a screening of Creature, I couldn't resist. I'd seen a trailer for the movie and knew that it was definitely a "low-budget" film; and with low-budget films comes low expectations.

Using a budget of approximately $3,000,000, an extremely small amount by Hollywood standards), Fred Andrews III makes his directorial debut. The most notable actor in Creature is horror film stalwart Sid Haig, mostly known for playing Captain Spaulding in the movies House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects. Sadly, Haig basically just plays a dumbed down version of Spaulding and sadly his is extremely underutilized because he's the best thing in the movie. The "creature", if you will, is not a computer generated image but is merely someone wearing a costume; similar to the way it was done back in the "good old days." Regrettably the comparison to the "good old days" stops there. Yes, there's the nudity, and quite a bit more than the standard gratuitous, there's pot smoking and drunkenness; but, the shock factor is lacking. The kill scenes show very little gore…if any at all. The characters are underdeveloped, giving you no one to relate to or to root for. The witty humor is dull and the dialogue isn't much better. There really isn't much that actually works.

Grade: F

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This is a fun little film that I used to see its kind playing in the drive-in back in the 1970s and early 1980s. It is always good to see Sid Haig, who starred in many of drive-in exploitation flicks back in the day before House of 1000 Corpses and Devil's Rejects made him a horror icon. The plot is pretty basic: six friends go into the swamp to check out a local legend and fall prey to a creature from the swamp that looks pretty cool. There is trouble with the locals as well as some personal betrayals going on. I see some early reviewers on this site, knocking the film as expected because, as I imagine, many of them did not grow up watching these creature features and have little love for them. This is the kind of film Drive-In critic Joe Bob Briggs used to review and champion; I only wish I had a chance to see it at a drive-in instead of a indoor theater.

Man i've watched some garbage movies lately. Monster brawl, dear god no, and then this. Im gunna try and go catch batman in theaters tonight to remind myself that good movies do exist. Basically everything in this movie is something we have seen before. Teens go to creepy rest stop, locals creep em out, they go somewhere they are warned not to go, locals terrorize them but there's more to be worried about, the creature. The creature is about the only remotely memorable part of this movie, it looked semi-cool but doesn't actually do anything worth talking about. Pretty much all the deaths happen off screen and we are shown maybe a severed limb or the spray from an attack but never the full out carnage so the death scenes are easily forgettable. The characters are all of the same characters from any other movie like this but at least the women show a lot of tits. plenty of nudity in this movie. Its all well made but nothing new or memorable at all I should have turned this movie off half way through like i did those other two.

While I like creature movies in general, I only like good ones. This movie has no business trying theatrical distribution. Its distributor is going to lose millions.

The movie is basically the same quality and mentality as what you might see produced by Roger Corman or Charles Band, which are dirt-budget cheaply written ride-the-trend productions. To their credit they launch careers for actors and filmmakers trying to get their first break, but the products are horrible.

The Corman / Band era is over, however. Until the 90's, movies like that could take advantage of the fact that nobody knew they sucked until it was too late. Word of mouth was only as good as your local community. Today we have the internet, where everyone with at least one finger and a brain stem can bang out their reaction to a movie and send it up to a site where it gets visibility. Thousands of viewers can rate movies at many sites, such as IMDb, Yahoo Movies, Fandango, Flix, Hulu, etc. This averages out to an overall audience reaction, despite idiots who give everything they see one star or those who give everything they see "all" stars. This rapid response medium spreads the word so fast that after just a day or two of release, I can see that hundreds or even thousands of people have averaged a movie to 4 stars out of 10, and that means I should steer clear of it.

(Obviously it didn't work with me this time because I'm one of those rare persons who doesn't pay much attention to the opinions of others.) The cost of distributing a movie to the theater is ENORMOUS. It is harder to distribute a movie to a US theater than it is to raise millions of dollars to produce it in the first place. With Blu-Ray on the rise, and the increasing popularity of using the internet to stream movies, theatrical distribution is riskier than ever.

I suppose the distributor of Creature figured the time was ripe. It's the second deep-south swamp horror to come out this month, the other being Shark Night, which was marginally better (but not a good bet either). I suppose they were inspired by the surprise success of Piranha 3D, which had a lot of star cameo power, a lot of gore, a lot of nudity, and a lot of fun. All Creature had was a little nudity, and that's just not enough. The plot was confusing, the characters were ridiculously unbelievable, and the creature costume was even worse than Swamp Thing 20 years ago.

Seriously, guys. College students can make a better film than this.