Five doctors of medicine who have been knowing each other for a long time, go on a camping trip far into the wilderness. The morning after the established their camping site they find that their boots are gone.
D.J. (Gary Reinike) organized the trip and is the only one who actually brought a second pair of shoes (some people are even less children of nature than I am), so he decides to trek to a comparatively close dam.
In the evening of the same day, someone plants an atrocious piece of wilderness art made of the always fashionable combination of sticks, a dead deer and a snake. The doctors panic and barely wait until daybreak to start to follow D.J., missing boots be damned.
Very soon, their unseen enemy starts to attack them in different ways to herd them in the direction he wants them to take.
Today seems to be the day of badly cut movies. The Creeper is also known under the title of Rituals, as far as I know featuring about ten minutes more footage.
Surprisingly this truncated version is still excellent. If not for some very rough edits I wouldn't have suspected anything untoward.
Some films seem to be produced to push as many of my buttons as possible.
Lets's see:
- Not one of the characters is a teenager. They are all real adults with a life and glimpses of a believable past.
- The film depends highly on the uncanniness of nature, our fear of helplessness and exposure in the face of something we don't understand.
- The picture also has the sense of grittiness that many movies of the Seventies just seem to wear naturally. It doesn't look like anyone was trying to achieve a special kind of flair, it seems a natural part of the proceedings.
- In addition to this The Creeper also has a necessary sense of cruelty. The kind mainstream pictures today are afraid of and too many horror films are trying too hard for.
What I didn't mention in the above is the excellent photography and the all-around great acting. Everybody goes for authenticity here...and succeeds.
Sure, the plot doesn't do much more than cross John Boorman's Deliverance with slasher elements, but the effect it achieves is much more important than originality.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment