Project Terrible: Creature (2011)

It's Terrible alright- terribly generic.  Today's film is Creature, a film whose name is even uninspired.  A quick IMDB Title Check shows 7 films and one TV Show with the same title.  So what is this generically-titled film about?  It's about a bunch of young adults who go down South on a Vacation trip, only to be beset by a bunch of rednecks and their urban legend.  Tales of a creature- it must be fake!  Let's go and see it for absolutely no good reason!  There's a little more to this film than meets the eye.  Well, not really.  It's a mish-mash of just about every Horror film you've ever seen and will ever see.  It's the 'Toss your Leftovers Into Water and Call it a Stew' of Horror Films.  Anything unique and original?  No.  What is your Generic Low-Budget Horror Film missing that every other one seems to have?  Sid Haig, of course!  He's here, since, well, I'm pretty sure that I could throw together a film and hire him at this point.  Sid either just really loves to work or doesn't know what the word 'No' means.  He's been in so many of these kinds of films that he's actually looping back to the role that made him famous to mainstream America.  As a bonus, could you throw in a name that was at one point going to be famous, but never got there?  Daniel Bernhardt- sold!  To see whether this film deserves to be the least-successful ever released commercially or not, read on...

The film uses the classic Syfy Opening and has a woman killed by an Alligator.  This does at least play into the story later, but you won't really know that for around an hour.

Hey look- let's rush right to Full Frontal.

A bunch of young people go off to the South.  They're just short of truly obnoxious, but not quite real people either.  That's the closest thing you'll get to a compliment, movie.

Haig plays the guy who runs a Local Shop.  He tells them about the legend of Lockjaw- the titular creature- and this intrigues them.  One of the group has head of him before, which should tell you what the film's obvious twist is.

The movie really drags its feet at times.  I'll spare you a lot of it.

That said, it's been about 10 minutes since we've seen some boobs.  Got some, movie?

Thanks a lot.  Skipping ahead, Blue Shirt Guy tells them the tale of Lockjaw, which seems to make the first scene have a point.  The short version: lady dies and guy- Bernhardt- goes crazy and somehow becomes Lockjaw.

Naturally, the group goes there, but not before breaking Continuity by having the redhead change shirts for one shot and then back again.

After more padding and crap, the film eventually gets to what you know is coming.  Until then, Lockjaw kills some of the native Residents, which contradicts pretty much everything you'll be told later.

In the meantime, here's some HLA- since this movie has nothing else to offer.

Skipping ahead further still, the Creature and the townsfolk start their plan.  It basically involves them sacrificing people to Lockjaw- a la The Wicker Man- in order to bring good luck.  How an Alligator/Man does this is never explained and never could be.

This scene also ends in an intentionally-misleading manner.  Thanks for that.

The townsfolk hold the ceremony and go to sacrifice the film's remaining chick to the creature.  What the point of the last sacrifice was is anyone's guess.  Despite taking a bullet through the femoral artery, our hero manages to fight the Creature pretty well.

Him and his girlfriend manage to kill the Creature- off-camera- and drive away.  They never check on the missing girl from two pictures back, setting up sequel bait for something that will likely never happen.

Mind you, there's a Hatchet III, so anything goes!  The End.

It's Terrible...if only because it's so disappointing.  Yes, you can be disappointed when you expect almost nothing.  Based on its abject failure and previous induction in Project Terrible, I expected something disappointing.  What I didn't expect was something in which so little effort was put into it.  That's not to say that shooting a movie is easy or that the make-up effects are terrible.  Instead, the movie's script is just a random collection of ideas that have been done a number of times before- almost always better.  Major plot points are stolen from films like The Wicker Man and Carnivorous (with DMX) & minor ones are stolen from previous works that sometimes included the Cast.  For example, House of 1,000 Corpses has some Hipster Tourists going to see 'Dr. Satan'- seemingly a Tourist Trap-, only to find out that he's real.  Who plays Dr. Satan?  Sid Haig!  While the villain here is still Haig, he's nearly in the same role.  It's one thing to shoe-horn Danny Trejo in as random Biker Vampires for the three From Dusk Til Dawn films, since they're allegedly a series.  If you don't want to say that they saw other films and copied them, then you have to at least admit that they're working from stock ideas based on those films.  Is that better?  You're not ripping off Two-Thousand Maniacs directly with the Rednecks, but you're copying the mystique that they have from films like that.  Hurray for you.  It's that same level of thought that led to this film being released wide theatrically- around 1,200 Screens- and bombing miserably.  It's that same level of thought that had a company with this Logo as a Producer for a Horror Film...

Next up, a Horror Sequel that took about twenty-years to see the light.  With all of this time to prepare, they made...mostly the same movie, only worse.  Stay tuned...