Creature

Director: Fred Andrews (2011)

Starring: Mehcad Brooks, Serinda Swan, Sid Haig

Find it: IMDB

A movie that The Internets hate even more than they hate Catwoman #1, Creature is garnering some truly awful reviews and a sense of scorn usually only reserved for Uwe Boll and Rob Schneider. Upon hearing that, it shot straight to the top of my must-see list. Having watched the thing, I can't say that it deserves all of the hate it's been receiving of late. Creature is far too much fun to dislike. Beware, this review is quite spoilerish:

Make no mistake though, Creature is a bad film. As I get older, I find myself becoming less and less interested in plot synopses that begin with the sentence "vacationing college students..." which is a big problem if you're a fan of horror. Creature is indeed about vacationing college students, and its opening moments see a car full of them pull up at a backwoods gas station only to have the locals take an immediate dislike to them. Presumably because the kids are overheard calling said locals "backwards" and generally insulting the place. It's film-making like this that makes me always side with the chainsaw-welding yokels. At least they have manners.

In this case, it's less the locals the kids have to worry about and more the movie's titular Creature. Handily the Creature is illustrated on the poster, so you can't say that you weren't warned when you complain about how shitty it looks.

There's a silly urban legend at play, some incest, a woman getting eaten by a white alligator (MOBY DICK, GEDDIT) and Sid Haig doing his very best with material only marginally more tolerable than a Rob Zombie film. And by 'tolerable', I mean utterly hilarious. The Creature's origin story has a man called Grimley go mad and kill a white alligator with his bare hands and then eat it afterwards. Oh sure, as origins go, it doesn't have the charm of Hatchet - but it does have a man killing and eating a white alligator after it murders his sister slash wife.

And the unintentional comedy doesn't finish there. There's a gratuitous lesbian scene that seems to come out of nowhere, followed by a man killing a snake and squirting its blood in the aforementioned occasional lesbian's face. Meanwhile, The Creature (unseen until well past the halfway mark) skulks in the bushes making clicky Predator sounds. When it finally does appear, it looks like the Alien from the end of Alien: Resurrection.

There's an almost constant force of unintentional hilarity. Sid Haig punches a woman in the face. After failing to get jiggy with her too-drunk friend, the Sometimes Sappho finds a man in the bushes and randomly starts jerking him off. But we shouldn't begrudge this bisexual babe her pleasures of the flesh; after all, she has rather a raw deal from Creature. Kidnapped by Haig and his Hillbillies, she suffers Texas Chain Saw Massacre bondage (complete with burlap gag) and winds up with her feet cut off.

Given Creature's incompetence, misogyny and thorough cheapness, it's beyond me how it managed to stagger past the Sy-Fy channel and into cinemas. The acting is good, I suppose, even if Sid Haig does look like he should be wearing clown makeup. Mehcad Brooks does a sterling job as the film's hero. His earnestness in the face of Creature's stupid rubber monster is truly admirable. It looks a lot like an episode of True Blood, so maybe they were trying to coast on that film's glory.

"Guys," one of the characters exclaims, as she wanders out of her tent wearing not much, "this isn't funny." I beg to differ.