Creep (dir. Christopher Smith, 2004)
A young woman Kate (Frank Potente) leaves one party for another, because supposedly George Clooney is in attendance, and then has a very bad time in the London Underground because it is rude to leave a party like that and to bother the star of One Fine Day. For those transgressions, she is menaced by the titular creep, a deformed murderer whose name we eventually learn is Craig.
Creep is something of a throwback to a different decade of horror, but replicating the tropes of the past in a more contemporary setting rarely does anything but remind audiences of how times have changed. While watching it, I kept thinking how much more frightening the attempted sexual assault by Kate’s coworker is than anything related. The makeup effects on the creep are impressive, but they are undercut by the fact that (1) he’s named Craig and (2) he has a history that makes him somewhat more sympathetic than any cannibalistic killer really should be. You could pull that off somewhat in the 1980s with Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger, but no longer.
The only really notable thing about Creep, I found, is that it might be the earliest depiction of a fatberg–like an iceberg, but made up of all the flushed wetwipes of an entire population seemingly incapable of cleaning their asses without them–in cinema. It’s a much smaller example of one than the behemoths currently beneath that doomed country, but it was much more interesting for me to see than some guy named Craig. Give me a movie about that instead.
oliveresque 