Creature

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.

I could tell this movie was going to be great when we walked into the theater and no one else was there. I had expected it to be awful from the get go, but it surprised me by also being completely nonsensical. What looks like a typical "monster eats a bunch of teens in the woods" movie is actually much more convoluted. Throughout, I couldn't shake the feeling that this had started off as a kinky softcore porn that accidentally mutated into a horror movie somewhere along the way. While the breasts all gave a moving performance, the rest of the cast left something to be desired. Of course, that could have just been the weird script. There should have been subtitles for the 40% of the dialogue that was delivered in fake Cajun accents, but what we could understand didn't make things any clearer. I mean, yeah, we got the gist of it, but we just kept asking why. Why did anyone do anything that they did in this film? I guess it's up to the viewer to decide. Audience participation!

I have no idea what the writer and director had on their minds when they set this baby up, but I'm pretty sure I can tell you what they didn't: logic, character development, timing, or continuity. If you love bad horror movies like I do, you might enjoy this, but honestly we spent more time being confused than laughing. Plus I kept waiting for it to stop beating around the bush and just turn into Deliverance 2 already, but it never did.

Let's face it. In a movie like CREATURE, it's all about... well, the creature. Who in this universe would watch this looking for fascinating characters, scintillating dialogue, or Fellini-esque direction?

No one.

So, is the titular terror a good use of latex? Yes! Lockjaw is a hulking, well-designed monstrosity of the first order. He / it looks great lumbering through the swampland in search of nosy young people.

Speaking of humans, they're your typical annoying twenty-somethings, as well as some inbred hillbilly types. Along for the ride are Pruitt Taylor Vince and the magnificent Sid Haig!

Yep, this one's for monster nuts only...

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.

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.