Directed by Patrick Brice
Starring Mark Duplass, Patrick Brice and Desiree Akhavan
We're approaching a lot of "lasts" here on the ol' Blog. Of which, I'm sure that exactly zero people care about. Well, we're about to be looking at the last found footage movies that I'm going to review. To be fair, I have a really long, love-hate relationship with this particular subgenre of horror. I've been tired of them for a long time, and while they've kinda gone by the wayside in more recent years, there's still a decent amount of them floating around out there because they cost roughly five bucks to make and always turn a profit. And some of them have been great. But I walk away from a lot of them these days just thinking that the movie would have been way, way better off without the gimmick of someone walking around with a camera "filming" everything as if it's real.
In the few horror circles that I stalk around on, these particular movies actually have a decent amount of hype. Creep and Creep 2 get a lot of praise for the performance of Mark Duplass, the lead guy who used to be one of the stars of The League and now runs a production company with his brother. But these flicks are the brainchild of director Patrick Brice, who even co-starred in the first one along with Duplass. I watched both movies back-to-back on the same night, an easy enough accomplishment since both are only about 75 minutes long. They're kind of a strange beast; there were points, especially during the first movie, where I found myself hitting the pause button to check to see how much time was remaining. But they gained momentum, and then...I thought about them when they were over. Movies that can do that are hard to find. So what are these movies about, and why exactly are they Creepy? Let's find out. Advance warning - this review is going to be spoilerific. Like, to the max.
Well, as I previously mentioned (I suppose one could say that it was AFOREMENTIONED - aren't you glad that some of these stupid non-jokes are approaching their final days?), director Patrick Brice is your de facto protagonist in the first film. His character's name is Aaron, and he is a videographer answering a Craigslist ad promising a decent payday if he'll only follow this mysterious guy around for a day. Said mysterious guy is, of course, Mark Duplass under the guise of the name "Josef." Quotation marks because there be a lot of surprises on the way. Brice himself is likable enough in his role, but Duplass just owns this role. You know from the first time you see him that there's something lurking under his tragic front story involving dying of cancer and recording a video for his family.
What you need to know about that first movie is this: as it goes on, it becomes apparent that Josef changes his story seemingly every ten minutes. There are sections of it that terminally drag, particularly the whole bit where the characters go out to a local watering hole and then a restaurant for a little game of "truth and more truth." It reaches its zenith when nightfall arrives back at Josef's amazingly large home in the woods where he tells a weird story about the fate of his wife that eventually results in Aaron hightailing it home. The end result? He starts getting...some DVDs in the mail from Josef, escalating into a shock ending that admittedly did catch me off guard but left me with the simple question that Josef, now exposed as a full-on serial killer who has done this sort of trick with tons of people in the past, poses to the audience - why not simply look behind? It was a decent ending that admittedly had me intrigued for more.
The second movie carried forth on that momentum. Unlike the first, where I was admittedly just waiting for the entire running time just to see what this dude's M.O. would turn out to be, this one was much more suspenseful specifically because you know what a sadistic f**k this guy is. You look back on various incidents from that first movie and think just how much he enjoys scaring his victims first before killing them, and now the character really is someone that you can hate. The setup this time involves Sara, a web show producer played by Desiree Akhavan whose series involves finding the people behind Internet personal ads and showing the world how strange they are. As such, the ad that she gets asking for a videographer for a day and that it's a big plus if they're a fan of Interview With the Vampire is right up her alley.
This time around, the filmmakers and Duplass himself (who co-wrote the script this time around) seemed to have a lot more fun with the premise. For starters, the character is remarkably honest with Sara from the first meeting save for a few small details, and she plays right along with the game of shooting a documentary about the world's most famous serial killer that no one knows. There actually are a few bits where we feel the slightest amount of pity for this guy, but they're always pushed back by his constant need to scare Sara only to get the tide turned on him on more than one occasion. For the better part of an hour, this is actually a pretty snappy little thriller, but it's one where the ending is kind of a letdown. In that way, it's kind of an exact opposite of the first, which left me flat for its middle section only to be rescued by a slam-bang finale.
Overall, I definitely think these are movies that are helped by the fact that they are short. Most found footage movies are pretty short, but it's absolutely crucial to these two flicks. We're dealing with a pretty thin premise here, after all. It's not like we're looking at demonic possession or something. Much like all films in this genre, you also have to get by the simple question of "why is this person still filming?" This is especially bad in the first, when Aaron just keeps on keepin' on with his documentary of being scared despite having enough evidence that he could have called the police on no less than six different occasions before he actually does and summarily tells them nothing. Suspending disbelief here is kind of a chore, so don't act like I didn't warn you.
Amazingly enough, though, the Creep movies manage to, well, creep past their hokey setups and stick with you despite some of the head-scratching things that the protagonists do. There are things here that will stick with you after the end credits roll; two particularly memorable bits are a really long sequence of dialogue in the second film where Duplass espouses the virtue of his favorite song and the story that may or may not have inspired him to become a serial killer and the scene that introduces the wolf mask that he frequently wears in the first film, complete with a name ("Peach Fuzz") and a dance. Did I mention that this dude wears a wolf mask? Well, he does. And it's laughable in the best way.
I award these films *** out of ****, mainly for the performances, the memorable bits of dialogue and my belief that we've all had a friend something like this guy.
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