Creep
A Notting-Hill set blonde becomes trapped on the Tube after dark. It gradually becomes clear that she is not alone. Nestled beside her in the urban filth and squalor lies the last vestige of horror fiction’s self-respect. While his contemporaries raid the Japanese myth larder in a rabid hunger for inspiration, Creep’s Christopher Smith appears content to tether his cliché-ridden slasher-fest....
A Notting-Hill set blonde becomes trapped on the Tube after dark. It gradually becomes clear that she is not alone. Nestled beside her in the urban filth and squalor lies the last vestige of horror fiction’s self-respect. While his contemporaries raid the Japanese myth larder in a rabid hunger for inspiration, Creep’s Christopher Smith appears content to tether his cliché-ridden slasher-fest firmly to the Resident Evil horror cache. Indeed, a number of scenes and planned scenes for this movie could have been lifted straight from the celluloid of the first Resident Evil picture. In Creep, suspense is abandoned in favour of gratuitous violence and gore. Male leads make their entrances and their exits as part of a bizarre hunted rely team, each of the men presented with too short a snippet of screen-time to demand empathy or respect.
Franka Potente’s emotional range is so limited that the movie’s female protagonist is can merely pant and whinge in response to the threat of a demented killer stalking her movements. The villain of the piece bears an uncanny resemblance to Gollum from the Lord Of The Rings films and the Phantom Of The Opera overtones present within the creature’s underground lair sprinkle unintentional and unsettling comedy into the more gruesome episodes of the film and it rapidly becomes clear that the creators of this picture would rather bleed their characters dry physically and emotionally on screen than sow the seeds of nightmares. The viewer is not invited to shiver. He is forced to feel sick.
The DVD extras help to illustrate the genre influences which led to the creation of the film; a discussion piece where director, cast and crew are quizzed at a horror fiction convention placed on the extras roll-call in an effort to convince the public that, contrary to popular understanding, someone actually took the Creep project seriously. Make-Up techniques are exposed in detail and the making-of Featurette journeys behind the scenes of the movie shoot in order to examine the practicalities of making a movie within the bowels of a cultural landmark. The alternative ending and beginning discussed in the extras do little but complicate the viewer’s understanding of the film and the already flimsy plot-structure of the picture is undermined still further as it becomes clear that story development and continuity were both sacrificed in favour of blood-and-guts-cinema.
Legend is littered with stories of creatures crawling lurking in the tunnels underneath London’s streets. A story for such a movie as Creep was already ready-made in the history books and in the scent of ghost stories. In ignoring legend and tradition, the Creep’s director has spat in the face of the imagination. Nightmares show us the flip side of life and human nature. To be scared is to learn. Horror is an integral part of the human condition. Yet, horror fiction has reached an impasse; the genre now forced to wade through post-modern twists on fairy-tales, remakes which gouge foreign ideals and force false modern sentiments into their place and teen slasher-romps with thread thin plots. In the absence of a credible chiller of a story all horror fiction can do is sit by the roadside and beg for loose change.
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