Creep: Review By carl

The best horror movies have always been the ones that tap into the audiences subconscious, placing them in a place that scares them, and a situation that terrifies them. Jaws did this with the water, Alien succeeded with outer space, and Creep really wants to do the same thing with subway tunnels.

Creep tells the story of Kate, a young woman who falls asleep while waiting for the last train on the London underground. Waking up she finds herself alone, locked up inside the dark labyrinth, and being perused by someone, or something, in the shadows.

It's a good concept to be sure and for the films dizzying first half writer director Christopher Smith really makes use of the unnerving setting. The claustrophobic tunnels of the subway become a major character in the film as lights flicker out at the most inopportune moments, stopped train cars stand in place as perfect hiding places for the killer, and an awful lot of things tend to jump out of the shadows. It's to the films credit that it is able to make a certain creepy use of the setting despite a definite overuse of the previous victim jumping out of the shadows shock we've all seen way to often before.

Unfortunately Creep suffers from something I like to describe as Jeepers Creepers syndrome. At around the half way point of the film the killer comes out of the shadows and what was once a bit of claustrophobic fun becomes an extended chase scene of tedious proportions. Once again we find ourselves with proof that it's hard to get even mildly scared when the aspect of imagination is so completely ignored, and the cheesy movie villain is given the complete spot light.

It's at this point in the film that its story starts to fall apart under closer scrutiny. It becomes harder and harder to accept a concept that so blatantly ignores safety features that prevent people from becoming trapped in the underground at night. Or not to notice the fact that at one point the character finds herself in the sewer system, and still heads back to the subway despite there being numerous exits from her current prison.

The cast try their best to make up for the shoddy writing but it just doesn't work. There's an honesty about Franka Potente's portrayal of Kate that should endear you to the character, but you just can't feel it. Kate is just too underdeveloped, you know nothing at all about the girl beyond the fact that she's a pretentious little slut who tends to do the dumbest things. It's just too hard to find yourself endeared to such an unlikable character and you find yourself not caring whether she lives or dies, which once again prevents you from feeling any suspense for her fate. The rest of the cast are likewise believable enough in their portrayals of a rapist, 2 bums and a sewage worker, but once again they remain nothing more than fodder put in place to make you jump. It's Sean Harris that really fails the cast though. There are numerous hints toward the Creep's true motives but they could mean any one of a million things, and so Harris decides to overplay the character into some kind of comic book super villain.

Still Smith does at least attempt to redeem his shoddy script with an abundance of unnecessary gore. Not gore of the disturbingly realistic kind, or the funnily silly kind, but of the perversely nasty, borderline pornographic kind. At one point we find a lost character in an abandoned hospital wing (quite why there's a hospital located in one of the cities subway tunnels is never actually explained) and the creep decides to perform surgery on her. This is performed by inserting a rather large blade between her legs and then grunting semi orgasmically as he thrusts the blade in and out. It's not an important plot scene, does not reveal anything about the characters psyche, and exists solely because the writer had lost interest in scaring the audience and simply wanted to shock them in the worst way. This is a tactic used; less extremely, throughout the entire second half of the film and never once does the approach get any scarier.

That about describes Creep though. It's a mundane, unnecessarily nasty little horror movie with a concept that could have, and should have, worked better with a different writer/director.