ALLIGATIONS OF WRONGDOING

The creature in Creature is Grimley, a human-alligator hybrid revered by a clan of inbred Louisiana swamp rats. Six extremely attractive, extremely idiotic young road trippers decide to camp out in Grimley’s traditional stomping grounds & soon find out that he’s more than just legendary.

Creature is a jaw-droppingly wretched movie—the director, Fred M. Andrews, doesn’t seem to have the first clue how build an authentic scare, or even an effective jolt—but for about half its length, it’s sort of amusingly tawdry in its badness. Much of the fun is provided by the sly-eyed, smirking redhead Lauren Schneider, who can claim the impressive distinction of having the most unintelligible diction in the cast, but who’s so energetically trashy & cute that it doesn’t matter.

About halfway in, though, as the gang falls into the clutches of Grimley &/or the rednecks, Creature stopped being fun. The tropes that have become de rigueur in the horror genre begin to assert themselves—young women in tank tops or camisoles, mewling for their lives as they’re tied down to chairs or otherwise menaced & abused. This crap, the artless legacy of Tobe Hooper’s harsh but superbly made Texas Chainsaw Massacre, is disgusting & tedious, but it’s not, for me, harrowing, in the aesthetically valid sense.

The antipathy to female sexuality to which these movies cater is clear, but I’m not sure it’s ever occurred to me what a broad streak of bourgeois class hatred—fear & loathing of the rural poor—that they also carry. There are some terrific actors, such as Sid Haig & Pruitt Taylor Vince, among the grinning, gibbering, incestuous hayseeds in Creature, & they’re entertaining as usual. But this stereotype could also be put on the shelf for a good long while, all the same.

One final note: The soundtrack of Creature includes—with what the filmmakers no doubt regard as withering irony—some fine roots music, including, over the end titles, “Keep on the Sunny Side of Life” & “That Old Time Religion” by New Jersey folk-rock duo Chasing June. Though I can’t say that Chasing June made Creature worth sitting through, I’m still grateful to this dreadful flick for showcasing them. Check them out here.