Creep (Guest Post)

Following on from previous guest posts, it’s going to be a more regular feature at Paragraph Film Reviews. This one’s from Franz Patrick over at franzpatrick.com – lots of great, short reviews and plenty variety from the classics, to the important, to the blockbusters. Twitter is here too. Click click.

Creep: Kate (Franka Potente) is psyched to meet George Clooney at a party in London, but she fell asleep while waiting for the last train that’s supposed to take her there. When she wakes up, not a soul is in the vicinity. All the gates are locked. It seems she has no choice but to spend the night. Little did she know that someone lives in the tunnels who kidnaps unsuspecting victims and experiments on them. Because the plot is painfully familiar, one would expect “Creep,” written and directed by Christopher Smith, to be more ambitious so it has something to separate itself from the rest of the pack. Instead, a handful of scenes are dedicated to Potente, whose facial expression barely changes, running around as if she was still on Tom Twyker’s “Run Lola Run.” The moments that lead up to the scares are executed lethargically, the background music appearing and disappearing so predictably depending on the placement of the “Boo!” moment. When it finally arrives, there’s more running and screaming. This interminable loop dominated the first half of the film. The picture might have benefited if the screenplay had eventually allowed its audience learn about the villain. Glimpses of images are thrown at us and we are expected to put it all together. The problem is, aside from the missing critical pieces in the puzzle, while we can force ourselves to interpret the images and what they mean, the answers end up either too vague or completely nonsensical. In other words, we don’t get a sense of uniqueness in terms of who the antagonist is and what makes him so terrifying, aside, of course, from the grizzly violence he’s more than willing to inflict. If the protagonist, execution, and antagonist are the major ingredients in a soup and they lack spice, will the soup taste good? Not very likely.

Score: 2.5/10