Les yeux de la jungle

The information I gathered together beforehand, from reading reviews and listening to people's opinions, unmistakably taught me to keep my expectations towards "Night Creature" very minimal. Everybody agrees that this is a non-worthwhile late 70's killer animal movie with incredibly poor production values and a whole lot of preposterously unnecessary padding footage. Still I was stubborn enough to continue tracking down a copy of this movie. The concept of a macho hunter obsessed with the combat-to-the-death against an invincible animal predator, taking place on a remote and inescapable island, is undeniably intriguing and potentially very suspenseful. Particularly because the legendary Donald Pleasance ("Halloween", "The Flesh and the Fiends") plays the obsessive hunter, and because the guy in the director's seat is Lee Madden ("The Night God Screamed", "Unchained Angels"), I literally ignored all the negative warning signs and nevertheless hoped to have stumbled upon a genuine hidden. Well, I was wrong … again! "Night Creature" truly is a failure of a film, and neither Donald Pleasance nor the bloodthirsty looking black leopard could do anything to avoid that. The film is irredeemably boring and repetitive sub plots are endlessly prolonged in order to reach the 80 minutes of playtime. Perhaps the formula could have worked as a short film, or an episode in some type of TV-show, but it's too confined for a long feature film and all of Madden's attempts to broaden the concept (like adding a dumb love story or insinuating a psychological ordeal) look just plain ridiculous. Millionaire Axel MacGregor is a self-made man who already achieved many things in widely versatile areas of expertise. Now he decided for himself that he would be the one slaughtering the ferocious Black Panther that already killed several people in a remote Thai area. When the animal nearly kills him instead of vice versa, MacGregor feels like a loser and offended in his manhood. He orders to capture the animal alive and ship it to his own private island, where he intends to continue the showdown. Unfortunately, however, MaGregor's estranged family just planned a surprise visit to the island at the exact same time. I still firmly believe the above could form a fantastic starting point for an exhilarating and suspenseful Man Vs. Animal thriller, but far too many things went wrong here. For some incomprehensible reason, Lee Madden loves to shoot all the action sequences in slow-motion. This annoying little gimmick does not only interrupt the pacing and tension; it's also very pointless because the wildlife footage is unclear & fuzzy anyway. The fake love story between Pleasance's geeky daughter and a chauvinist tour guide is uninteresting and the film is full of illogical twists. The often repeated simulations where Pleasance stoic face transforms in the muzzle of the leopard are completely retarded. Judging by his uninspired performance, Donald Pleasance wasn't the least bit interested in putting energy into this film, so why should we.

The recent DVD release of this is pretty murky and mediocre at best, but the film is worth a look, especially for animal attack movie fans.

The opening scene is pretty laugh inducing with its POV cat footage, and most shots of the impressive title beast are used at least twice but the film does build some momentum. Ross Hagen, the producer and actor is pretty hard to take in his perky mugging fun lovin' tour guide character but once he gets scared by the cat things improve.

The direction is a big pain in the ass, lots of freeze frames and slow motion--the slow motion is actually effective once you get used to it but the stills and the voice over, especially right at the start have to be put up with rather than learned to liked.

The island setting with its ruined temple and rain is impressive as is the cat action stalking around the ruins or into the house. Good kitty. Cat training and wrangling gets top marks. There is a prolonged kill scene at night which is pretty intense, despite the hard to see DVD quality of it. This kill motivates Pleasance to do maybe his best crying freak-out in a long career. It belongs on any Pleasance fan's greatest hits tape! This is also one of the few in his fistful of film credits where he is the major character in the film rather than just showing up a couple of times quickly as happened more in the back half of his career--aside from the Halloween movies.

He totally unglues in this great scene, it is shocking actually the way it should be, this breakdown scene. From that moment on the film is much better and gains momentum steadily until the ending.

Has to be said that more people should have died for this to be more drama and less melodrama, but the central theme for the Pleasance character does work itself out and his interaction with the other characters is interesting. That can't be said for the interaction of those supporting characters on their own.

Probably unlikely a better DVD will come along anytime soon, and too bad the film didn't have a better director, but again the cat is impressive and if you can put up with serious problems in the first 30 minutes it's worth the ride.

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.

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

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.