jonadab
Joined Jan 2004
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jonadab's rating
An ordinary B movie is bad, usually in a variety of ways. A few special movies stand out from the rest because they are unusually bad in a wider variety of ways. Occasionally you will see the term "Z-movie" used to describe the worst of the worst. This one makes them all look like award-winning major motion pictures. Nothing else is bad like this move is bad.
There are so many things to pick on in The Creeping Terror, one review cannot begin to enumerate them all, so I'll just give a small sampling.
I'll talk about lighting first, because it's one of the things that really separates the men from the boys when it comes to badness. A lot of otherwise fairly bad movies do an almost passable job with the lighting. The Creeping Terror, on the other hand, botches the lighting in a remarkably diverse collection of different ways. Some shots are underexposed. Some are overexposed. Many have uneven lighting. Some have lighting in exactly the wrong places, e.g., the background is lit better than the action. Scenes that might have benefited from limited lighting were filmed under the noonday sun. One could spend two or three viewings of this movie just making notes about various ways the lighting was botched.
Many other reviewers have talked about the soundtrack, but it really is spectacularly bad. Not only is every part of it bad individually, but the parts do not go together to form a coherent whole, not even stylistically. The music, quite aside from completely changing styles partway through the flick, is terribly out of place in a horror movie. Even if TCT is considered as a spoof, which I don't believe for one minute was the director's intention, the music is still badly out of place. Then there's the talking. I'm not a big fan of narration at the best of times, but this movie raises bad narration to an art form. There's not much bad dialog, but that's because there's not much dialog. Most of the actors, even some fairly major characters, do not have speaking parts at all.
As far as the acting, it's probably enough to say that I don't think anyone in this movie was also in another movie, either before or after, and I don't believe that's a coincidence.
The characters are bad, unbelievable and mundane at the same time. The writing is terrible. The directing is so impossibly inept, the movie would certainly have been much better with no directing at all. The costuming is at the level of junior-high drama class. The props are bad even for an extreme-low-budget sci-fi horror flick. The word "plot" can scarcely be mentioned in the same sentence with this movie.
The best thing about The Creeping Terror is the sets. Rather than filming the whole movie in a single room with amazingly bad backdrops, as would be consistent with the general level of quality in this flick, they instead actually filmed in several outdoor locations (a field, a road, a hill, a woods, a creek) and two or three different buildings. In fact, I would go so far as to call several of the sets mostly believable. If it is theoretically possible to make a worse movie than The Creeping Terror, the mechanism by which this dubiously impressive feat would be accomplished would have to revolve around using worse sets.
However, I am not sure that it is possible to equal the severe badness of this movie in other respects. Certainly, I have seen no other movie that's even playing in the same ballpark. The infamous "Manos": The Hands of Fate, for instance, falls well shy of the extreme horribleness that is The Creeping Terror.
Just to cite one concrete example, the long driving scenes in Manos feature changing scenery and some dialog and yet are much shorter and fewer than the many, lengthy, boring, painfully-slow creature-approach scenes in The Creeping Terror, which are only exacerbated by the incredibly dull narration. Manos also has better lighting, writing, characters, acting, dialog, camera work, ... and Manos is potentially scary, if you're very easily frightened. The photo on the wall in Manos (or even the barking dogs for that matter) is FAR scarier than anything in The Creeping Terror, unless you're afraid of being bored to death. The music in Manos is arguably in the same general category of badness as the Creeping Terror music, but the Manos music is more consistent in theme throughout the movie, and spookier.
Also, Manos has a plot that is developed as the movie progresses. Indeed, compared with anything The Creeping Terror has to offer it's practically Pulitzer material.
No, Manos cannot compare. The Creeping Terror is far, far more execrable.
Indeed, nothing compares. Name whatever outstanding example of bad film-making you like, from any genre: terrible no-budget children's movies, high-school drama class projects, you name it, this pile of turkey dung tops them all. The people who say other movies are bad have not seen this one. There is no other bad movie. The Creeping Terror stands alone, the one and only truly abysmal, completely and severely botched movie in all history. Next to The Creeping Terror, all other movies are well conceived, well planned, well executed, quality storytelling.
Oh, and did I forget to mention that The Creeping Terror is preachy? Oh, yes, it is, and in the most lame way imaginable. If I nearly forgot to mention the horrible, pedagogically condescending, egregiously didactic rhetoric in this flick (especially at the ridiculous end), it's because the viewer hardly even notices such a minor and forgivable thing amidst the movie's many much worse issues.
There are so many things to pick on in The Creeping Terror, one review cannot begin to enumerate them all, so I'll just give a small sampling.
I'll talk about lighting first, because it's one of the things that really separates the men from the boys when it comes to badness. A lot of otherwise fairly bad movies do an almost passable job with the lighting. The Creeping Terror, on the other hand, botches the lighting in a remarkably diverse collection of different ways. Some shots are underexposed. Some are overexposed. Many have uneven lighting. Some have lighting in exactly the wrong places, e.g., the background is lit better than the action. Scenes that might have benefited from limited lighting were filmed under the noonday sun. One could spend two or three viewings of this movie just making notes about various ways the lighting was botched.
Many other reviewers have talked about the soundtrack, but it really is spectacularly bad. Not only is every part of it bad individually, but the parts do not go together to form a coherent whole, not even stylistically. The music, quite aside from completely changing styles partway through the flick, is terribly out of place in a horror movie. Even if TCT is considered as a spoof, which I don't believe for one minute was the director's intention, the music is still badly out of place. Then there's the talking. I'm not a big fan of narration at the best of times, but this movie raises bad narration to an art form. There's not much bad dialog, but that's because there's not much dialog. Most of the actors, even some fairly major characters, do not have speaking parts at all.
As far as the acting, it's probably enough to say that I don't think anyone in this movie was also in another movie, either before or after, and I don't believe that's a coincidence.
The characters are bad, unbelievable and mundane at the same time. The writing is terrible. The directing is so impossibly inept, the movie would certainly have been much better with no directing at all. The costuming is at the level of junior-high drama class. The props are bad even for an extreme-low-budget sci-fi horror flick. The word "plot" can scarcely be mentioned in the same sentence with this movie.
The best thing about The Creeping Terror is the sets. Rather than filming the whole movie in a single room with amazingly bad backdrops, as would be consistent with the general level of quality in this flick, they instead actually filmed in several outdoor locations (a field, a road, a hill, a woods, a creek) and two or three different buildings. In fact, I would go so far as to call several of the sets mostly believable. If it is theoretically possible to make a worse movie than The Creeping Terror, the mechanism by which this dubiously impressive feat would be accomplished would have to revolve around using worse sets.
However, I am not sure that it is possible to equal the severe badness of this movie in other respects. Certainly, I have seen no other movie that's even playing in the same ballpark. The infamous "Manos": The Hands of Fate, for instance, falls well shy of the extreme horribleness that is The Creeping Terror.
Just to cite one concrete example, the long driving scenes in Manos feature changing scenery and some dialog and yet are much shorter and fewer than the many, lengthy, boring, painfully-slow creature-approach scenes in The Creeping Terror, which are only exacerbated by the incredibly dull narration. Manos also has better lighting, writing, characters, acting, dialog, camera work, ... and Manos is potentially scary, if you're very easily frightened. The photo on the wall in Manos (or even the barking dogs for that matter) is FAR scarier than anything in The Creeping Terror, unless you're afraid of being bored to death. The music in Manos is arguably in the same general category of badness as the Creeping Terror music, but the Manos music is more consistent in theme throughout the movie, and spookier.
Also, Manos has a plot that is developed as the movie progresses. Indeed, compared with anything The Creeping Terror has to offer it's practically Pulitzer material.
No, Manos cannot compare. The Creeping Terror is far, far more execrable.
Indeed, nothing compares. Name whatever outstanding example of bad film-making you like, from any genre: terrible no-budget children's movies, high-school drama class projects, you name it, this pile of turkey dung tops them all. The people who say other movies are bad have not seen this one. There is no other bad movie. The Creeping Terror stands alone, the one and only truly abysmal, completely and severely botched movie in all history. Next to The Creeping Terror, all other movies are well conceived, well planned, well executed, quality storytelling.
Oh, and did I forget to mention that The Creeping Terror is preachy? Oh, yes, it is, and in the most lame way imaginable. If I nearly forgot to mention the horrible, pedagogically condescending, egregiously didactic rhetoric in this flick (especially at the ridiculous end), it's because the viewer hardly even notices such a minor and forgivable thing amidst the movie's many much worse issues.
