Creep

creeprating 2.0I could glibly give my own one word review to match with the title; something like "Shit." But I guess I'll go a few steps further and talk about this pointless, overhyped trainwreck.

I've never seen any of Mark Duplass' work, outside of "The League". As a director and writer, he's completely unknown to me. As an actor, I have a respect for him because of his comedic work on "The League", but my impression of the content he chooses to make is usually that it seems like boring or kitschy hipster bullshit. His friend, Patrick Brice, who directed and co-wrote Creep, seems even less worthy of my time and attention, yet here we are.

The co-writers star in a very not-good "found footage"-ish movie about a cameraman showing up to a gig where he's supposed to film someone for the day. The man turns out to be Duplass, which was a surprise to me, because for some reason I thought he was playing the cameraman in the scenario. At least that means I got to see more of his acting than the stiff, unbelievable bullshit that came out of Brice.

Duplass' character claims to be dying of a brain tumor and is recording videos for his unborn son. The seemingly-dimwitted cameraman films scenes of him doing stupid bullshit. All of it felt like an exceptionally weak improv exercise, probably because they outlined the move and then improvised each scene upwards of 10 or 20 times, ultimately choosing the one they liked later. As such, the details of the movie that stick are neither interesting or compelling. There's no tight script to hold this together; there was no real script at all. Instead, there's a huge focus on the endless cringey monologues Duplass gives about childhood baths with his father and a wolf mask found in a closet, named "Peachfuzz". "Peachfuzz" was apparently almost the name of the film, but they smartly changed it. Unfortunately, they didn't just erase all the footage and forget all this ever happened. So you have to watch boring scenes of nothing, followed by someone obviously being creepy but the person filming being too stupid to just leave; you just groan your way through the insufferable plot.

It might not surprise you to find out that this was touched by the hand of Blumhouse. It may not seem relevant or important to the review, but the 100% correlation between Blumhouse and shit-garbage is too much to ignore.

Okay, that aside, Duplass is a good actor, but he's improvising dumb horseshit where he's just fucking with the guy and then stalking him, while Brice does nothing more to protect himself than change a lock and call the police then give up when they don't do anything. The movie is just over 75 minutes, mercifully short, but I was looking at the clock by 35 minutes in, sure that this couldn't go on much longer, hoping it would stop so I could watch anything else. I at least had the option of looking at Black Friday sales on my phone while they meandered through Take 18 of Peachfuzz singing a song, which must have really cracked those knuckleheads up, but us real people having to watch the fucking movie didn't appreciate it, I can assure you of that. Then Brice gets killed and it's all part of serial killer Duplass' snuff collection. Whoopty-fuckin'-doo. What a fucking turd.

Now, for some reason, there's a huge amount of people that like this movie, find it frightening, find it to be well-made; those people don't belong in this world. If your reaction to this film is anything but contempt, you and your lack of imagination are the problem here. You obviously have led a sheltered life to find meaning in these fucking dregs. Because there's nothing here. People praise of this film is the fucking Emperor's New Clothes, if I've ever seen it.

So, don't watch this. It is not good. It was a bad idea from the start and shooting it using nothing more than a bunch of aimless improv was not a smart idea. There is no horror, there is no drama, there is no comedy. It's the film equivalent of a facepalm.

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