Creep Movie Review:


Writer-director Smith shows a willingness to go for broke that makes this film disarmingly entertaining, in an extremely grisly sort of way. He also fills the film with subtle, witty touches that turn an everyday location into a paranoid nightmare.

After Kate (Potente) falls asleep waiting for the last train at the Charing Cross Tube station, she wakes up to find herself locked inside the Underground. An encounter with a slimy womaniser (Sheffield) freaks her out, so she takes refuge with a homeless couple (Rattray and Scott) and eventually a sewer worker (Blackwood). Together they must try to escape an unseen presence (Harris) who's violently killing the station's sparse overnight population one by one.

For most of the film, Smith adeptly avoids cliches with smart writing and inventive direction. The film feels organic--this is the way real people behave in these kinds of situations, although as the story progresses they begin to do stupid things like, well, I'm not telling. Meanwhile, Smith shoots the film cleverly, playing with focus and depth of field to overcome his budget limitations and make the setting look both eerily familiar and terrifying at the same time.

Potente seems a bit miscast here, but handles it well, as do the rest of the actors, although Harris' "creep" is rather goofy, really. But by the time we see him the film has us in its grip with its relentless pacing and knowing script. There are, of course, overtones of Phantom of the Opera here, as well as a playful infestation of rats and several astute comments on homelessness.

But Smith is going for the fright factor, and he gets a bit carried away at times. There are at least two scenes of gratuitous gore that add nothing at all to the narrative. And when the film goes silly at the end, it goes very silly indeed, with little coincidences and unlikely bits of horror-movie business that undermine the clever logic of the film's first two-thirds. But the extremely witty final scene will leave you throwing quick glances into the corners for quite awhile after the lights come up.



Rich Cline

Falling asleep in a London Tube station waiting for a train to take her to another party, Kate (Potente) awakes to find the station deserted and completely locked up. As a train pulls into the station, she thinks that she is safe and on her way, when it suddenly comes to a grinding halt. With no sign of the driver, she starts looking for someone to help her and runs into Guy (Sheffield), who followed her from the party she had just left. Drunk, he becomes a bit too amorous but just as he is about to go too far, he is dragged off Kate and pulled under the train, screaming for his life.

UK horror films have seen a bit of a resurgence with cult successes of ‘Shaun of the Dead’ and ‘Dog Soldiers’ but can ‘Creep’ keep the momentum going? The answer is a definite no!

‘Creep’ sees a return to the rot that was setting into the UK horror scene. The movie is a giant leap backwards in terms of plot, character and scares. While hits like ‘Shaun of the Dead’ and ‘Dog Soldiers’ took an established genre (Zombies and Werewolves) and gave then it a very British spin, ‘Creep’ tries to reinvent the mutant killer but just ends up been drenched in cliché.

Back story, character development and scares are completely substandard, making the movie a complete mess, and not even a bloody one. The situation is contrived, the setting isn’t scary enough (too much light) and the killer just looks cheap and not a creep. We never find out a real reason for his killing spree, other than he is the result of an experiment that went wrong and he witness a lot of grizzly killings as he grew up. The character design is also extremely poor, making him look like a ‘rat boy’ who wanders around making stupid noises that make rats follow him around.

The standard of the acting doesn’t help either. Much of this can be blamed on the awful script that is riddled with appalling dialogue, but that doesn’t excuse the performances of the actors. Chief amongst these is leading actress Franka Potente, which is surprising as she is a very good actress, as anyone who as seen ‘Run Lola Run’ or ‘The Bourne Identity’ will tell you. It seems like she is on autopilot, running on a low battery and can’t be bothered to make any effort in the slightest. The same can be said about the rest of the cast who make amateur dramatics look good.

‘Creep’ is simply awful. Co-Funded and distributed by the UK Film Council, which is the organisation that allocates UK Lottery Funds to movies; this proves that they need to employ a much better script read before the start investing money given by the British Public.

Jamie Kelwick

 

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