Creep - International Trailer + Review
The fine folks over at Pathe know how to make a fine trailer for a slightly-above-average horror pic:
QT High (10 Mb)
QT Med (4.7 Mb)
QT Low (1.6 Mb)
It's a step above the original X-Filme trailer here.
Attention all Franka Potente fans: She is excellent as a "Scream Goddess" in this film.
Christopher Smith's first feature film by no means a perfect genre film. He shows an incredible competence for the jump-scare style horror film which does well to raise the level of scariness beyond most entries in the genre (well, to about Ju-On: The Grudge level). As a script writer however, he needs a lot of work. The film goes off the rails (pun intended) so many times here that it undermines the great acting from Franka Potente *Transmitting Fanboy Love*.
The story is simple. A woman leaves a party to catch a late subway train, falls asleep in the station and is locked inside. She is being stalked by something underground and interacts with a lot of the people who live and/or work down there in both the active tunnels and the many abandoned ones.
There is not much subtext here (this is not Guillermo del Toro's or Nimrod Antal's underground) other than a brief and darkly humourous comment on how the average city dweller thinks of the homeless.
The scares are many, and most are pretty darn effective. One of the movies strengths is that there are many scenes in which the movie does things just a bit different than your average horror film. Just when things are getting interesting however, it gets all convetional again. At a certain point believability is pushed way out of bounds and the last 20 minutes are chalk full of badly executed horror cliches that cheapen the great 1st and 2nd acts (a la Jeepers Creepers and High Tension).
I give this a luke-warm recommendation to hard-core horror fans (this is way too much for the average multiplex horror fan). That being said, i am really looking forward to his next film where Smith may hopefully work out the snags he gets caught up in here.
