CREATURE
"A group of friends partying in the wilds of Louisiana fight for their lives when a beastly half-man, half-alligator comes searching for food."
A long time ago, Siro from the Mortal Kombat: Konquest television series lived in the fucking swamp like an asshole. He never wore a shirt, and he never had to worry about the swarms of biting insects because his natural manly odor kept them all at bay, allowing Siro to display his muscular torso all day long as he toiled in the mud, doing surely important things that are never adequately explained. He also banged his sister on the regular, but she was cool with it, so it wasn't weird.
One fateful day, an astoundingly terrible-looking albino alligator puppet snatched his sister-with-benefits, dragging her into the filthy, filthy swamp. Siro shirtlessly tracked his pale nemesis through the muck, but was unable to reach his beloved kin before the gluttonous gator puppet had eaten his fill of incestuous flesh.
Having lost the love of his life at the jaws of a legendary swamp beast, poor Siro did what any of us would have done: he killed that beefy puppet with his bare hands then ate him raw, along with his dead sister and a few other random corpses that were just hanging around at the time. Then he transformed into an ageless alligator man with a face too goofy to take seriously, stalking the bayou for over a century in search of human flesh to devour... and maybe a new lady to bear his scaly spawn.
Over the decades, I guess the locals took to worshipping old "Lockjaw" as some sort of emissary of the divine for reasons that are absolutely beyond me, and they orchestrate regular sacrifices to appease their immortal alligator-man/demi-god, giving up their kin as blood offerings, which he readily accepts. The locals have also developed a habit of kidnapping outsiders and allowing Lockjaw to rape them, because after all this time the hopeless romantic is still just looking to settle down and start a family.
But some guy who used to be in the U.S. Army didn't like watching his pals get shredded by this dumb-looking gator man, so he crawled into a hole in the mud and killed Lockjaw in what was surely an epic off-screen battle, then he stole Sid Haig's car and took his catatonic girlfriend back to civilization, never stopping to inform the proper authorities that an incestuous hillbilly cult and their swamp god killed all of his pals, so the hillbillies get away with it all.
They even managed to indoctrinate one of the soldier's thought-to-be-dead friends into their club, a woman who was raped off-screen by Lockjaw and gave birth to a cute little alligator baby that will carry on his daddy's legacy of wandering aimlessly around the swamp, looking stupid and getting his giant ass kicked on his home turf by random people because he's just not a very effective monster.
Creature was theatrically released in 2011 on over 1,500 screens, and nobody watched it. This movie seemingly came out of nowhere, was thrust into a wide theatrical release, and it failed so spectacularly that it became something of a cautionary tale for independent distributors. "What the fuck were they thinking?!" That was the ultimate question. Nobody asked for this movie. Nobody wanted it. But the fucking Bubble Factory tried to shove it down our throats, and we collectively puked it back up, rejecting it on a fundamental level.
But why? Is Creature really that bad? It's a technically competent film, I suppose. It tells a story in a linear manner with no massive gaffes in either its visual presentation or its sound design. But the story Creature is telling sucks. The incest angle was clearly added for shock value, but it doesn't shock. It doesn't do anything. Nothing in this movie does anything.
There's absolutely no flair to this movie. It looks ugly and cheap and boring when it starts, and it maintains this off-putting aesthetic right up until the end. The movie is presented in such a dull, matter-of-fact way that it prevents the audience from ever growing even the least bit interested in the events it portrays.
This extends to the design of "Lockjaw", the entire reason this movie was made. He's meant to be this legendary monster that has stalked the bayou for over a century, an unstoppable beast with the cunning of a man, and it looks like a fucking Goomba from the Super Mario Bros. movie. How did this design not get immediately rejected in favor of absolutely anything else?
Did the director see the Super Mario Bros. movie as a child and come away permanently scarred by the appearance of the stupid, pin-headed Goombas? Did this design awaken that primal dread that he has carried within him all of these years, and did he assume that other people were also frightened by those derpy-looking sons of bitches? Because he was wrong. He was so, so wrong.
I highly doubt it was this film's intention for the audience to catch a glimpse of their monster and just break out in fits of uncontrollable laughter. The design inspires mockery and derision, not fear and disgust, and that really holds true for everything else in Creature, though the film is not a good candidate for MST3K-style riffing, because it's just too long and too boring to mock with any sustained energy level. I wanted to stop watching the movie minutes after I started it, and that desire to just call it quits and walk away only grew substantially as Creature slowly lumbered to its inevitable conclusion.
Why are you in this movie, Pruitt Taylor Vince?! What the fuck happened to you that you had to agree to co-star in Creature?! You're better than this! You're so much better than this!!! How far have we fallen that tripe like Creature isn't rejected as a form of career suicide?!
I have nothing further to say about this movie.
YOUR TIME IS RUNNING OUT!
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