Film Review: Creeper (2012)

SYNOPSIS:

Heather and her friends have some devilish fun on the social website, ConnectMeNet. However, their amusement has come at the expense of a lonely and medicated half-wit, Jerry Tobin. After goading him into humiliating himself on camera in various cruel acts of depravity, they post the clips online for the world to see in a video titled “Revenge on a Creeper”. This ruins Jerry’s meager life and he disappears without a trace… Fast forward a year, and the tables are now turned when Jerry reemerges, off the antipsychotic medication that clouded his thoughts and kept his demons at bay. Now the girls are forced into a nightmarish fight for their lives!

REVIEW:

Oh man, Creeper is such a dirty, nasty, uncomfortable movie. This is the type of movie you think about taking a shower after. It’s the type of movie in which you know you’re supposed to root for someone, but either side you choose you’re going to have trouble justifying. Let’s just say, the girls in Mean Girls have absolutely nothing on the ladies in Creeper…and they’re the supposed “good guys.” But hey, at least in the end, we know that everything will turn out all right, right? No. No, we do not.

The story of Creeper starts out with a naked girl in a cage getting dragged underwater. First scene, and there it is already, and you’re wondering who is this girl, why is she in a cage, did she just drown, and what kind of evil person would be doing this to her? Then we are slapped with a “One Year Earlier” subtitle tag, and we realize that we are going to be building up to something, well, creepy. Then we meet our main characters: Erica (Monica Chambers), Cally (Rohnja Morrow), Dana (Brittney Cardella), and Heather (Amber Sym, aka Tara Price). These girls decide that women are treated so badly by anonymous, shady guys on the internet, “creepers” as they call them, and it’s time to get a little payback. So they sign up on a site and wait for the perfect guy…one whose life they can ruin.

Enter Jerry Tobin (Darryl Baldwin), a possibly mute, possibly distant relative of Tom Atkins, who writes the girls and asks to be friends. He seems innocent enough, quiet and kind of lame, and the girls decide he’s “the one.” They tease him, asking him to do embarrassing stuff on his webcam with the promise that they’ll eventually give him something in return. They ask for a d*ck pic, then ask him to shave down there. They get him to tase himself, to pierce his nipple, to tattoo Erica’s name on his chest, always giving him a little glimpse of themselves to keep him interested. Eventually they are making him eat his feces from the toilet and whip himself. They decide that’s enough, that it’s time to move forward, that the next logical step is his death. He is lured out to a field with a video of three girls in the shower together, then jumped, beaten, and hung. A year later (as we remember from the opening), he gets his revenge.

Creeper is a brutal revenge movie that turns the genres tables a bit – usually, we are rooting for the victimized pretty girl to get revenge on her big mean attacker(s), but this time we get a quiet, bullied man pushed to the limits by four attractive girls…who started out with a shady, but somewhat honorable, plan that gets taken much too far. The second half of this movie becomes a cat and mouse game, where the cat has a moustache and is ex-military and the mice are completely nude young women (for real, until they find shirts with taunting messages written on them along the way, these girls are straight up naked for probably half their screen time). Things get uglier as the girls find themselves in the middle of a forest with questionable clues left out for them, some of which are boobie traps, and various tablets showing them that all of this is being live-streamed on the internet.

Creeper is writer/director Matthew Gunnoe’s first feature film, but like many other independent horror films, for one reason or another it found itself delayed, in a state of limbo – the movie was completed in 2012, but was only available in a limited capacity. Also like many other independent horror films, Unearthed Films recognized this diamond in the rough and swooped in for the rescue, and Creeper will finally be available in September of 2015. Like I mentioned before, this movie is very grimy, very sleazy, to the point where you feel a little gross after you finish it. There are some brutal scenes in here, harsh, violent scenes that you’ll remember for quite a while. Combine that with constantly nude girls who are often covered in blood, mud, or “other,” and you’ve got an idea of what to expect. It’s not a perfect movie, and there are a couple of holes in the story here and there, but overall it’s as enjoyable as it is nasty. I’m excited to check out more of Gunnoe’s films, many of which feature some of these same actors. Acknowledging that this is indeed his first movie, I can only imagine the grizzly intensity of his more recent work. Mark September 29, 2015 on your calendar – this is one you’ll want to remember to pick up.