Wednesday, November 5, 2008

No thanks, I'll take the bus.



Creep is a British horror movie from 2005 that I just watched recently and found somewhat interesting.
The premise:
In London, Kate (Franka Potente, below) is headed to a late-night party and ends up taking the subway (or tubes or rails I think they call them overseas).



She is tired after a long day (and evening of partying!) and while waiting for the last train (to take her to a party where she apparently thinks she is going to seduce George Clooney- I shit you not), she accidentally falls asleep.

When she wakes up, she is alone at the station. Apparently she has been locked in.
Now if I'm being honest here, I had no idea, for one thing, that the subway ever closed in London. Does it? And if it does, what are the chances that the subway employees would neglect to wake you up and shoo you out?
It makes for a very spooky setting.

Anyhoo- Kate is locked in and soon becomes rather paranoid. She thinks she is not alone.
She's not. There is something lurking in the bowels of the underground and it has discovered she is there.

Here is our "creep".



He is some kind of mutant, not completely unlike the cave dwellers from 'The Descent', with a little bit of Darkman thrown in.
He's got some kind of doctor-complex and has an oogey collection of fetuses in his makeshift laboratory. I didn't completely get the whole reason that he was down there - maybe they said and I missed it, I don't know. In any event, Dr. Creep is determined to pick up a few chicks - what he will do with them... you don't really want to know.

While obviously not a big budget film, it does have some atmosphere - after all, wouldn't the subway one of the most un-nerving places to become stranded and alone?
It really put me in mind of that dude in 'An American Werewolf In London' - the one that gets attacked by the werewolf in the subway. The walls are all so starkly white and the blood just shows up sooo well. Same case here.

Kate is not completely alone, she finds out. Besides the Creep, there are some homeless people, a subway/sewer maintenence guy, and a few other random folks. There have to be others there so as to increase the body count, right?
I wouldn't have been too disappointed if they did away with Kate right away, a 'la Psycho - she was actually a fairly vain, annoying and vapid character.

But for a low-budget scarefest, this isn't the worst thing you could watch. The acting was decent enough, and like I said it had its scary moments. Not anything to lose sleep over though. It was basically a cat and mouse chase in subterranean tunnels.



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