Creepies

Creepies

2003

Jeff Leroy

‘Creepies’ is the movie, ‘Eight Legged Freaks’ (2002) wishes it could have been. It was probably made at a 10,000^th maybe even a 100,000^th of the budget of that movie but it is a million times more ambitious.  I can’t quite bring myself to say it’s any good, but it is without out a doubt made with a lot of love and vision. That vision is shared by every seven year old with a couple dozen plastic tanks and a love for exploding body parts and spiders. Were the super hokey effects supposed to be a joke? Honestly it’s very hard to tell, but that part of this movie’s charm.

Creepies wastes no time in getting to the big spiders eating army guys, which makes up the bulk of the movie. Recounting the plot is kind of pointless but here goes; the army develops a super spider to attack enemy positions. It keeps about 400 of these spiders, which are about the size of your head, in a suitcase that could comfortably hold a small toaster. Naturally a bunch of spiders get loose, the army runs around shooting at them and getting eaten; we then cut to a girl band on the way to a studio to record a demo. It seems the army also is in the habit of accidentally mailing these suitcases to small record labels.  There’s a huge spider, some helicopters, a big rocket launching tank that proceeds to destroy most of the landmarks in Hollywood and a music montage that includes a girl trying to drop a knife on a fake spider about four hundred times. Oh and Ron Jeremy is in it for about two minutes of wandering around the front of building before he gets eaten. Somewhere around the half-way point a spider gives a rallying speech to its comrades that they need to kill all the humans, and the last half of the movie is pretty much straight up given over to blowing up miniatures.

When Ron Jeremy is easily your best actor and the rest of the cast are out acted by a computer spider, the less said the better.

Every single thing about ‘Creepies’ is so fake and cheap that it becomes its own aesthetic.  All the models are obvious toys; the cgi for the spiders feels like it came out of the early 90’s. The city models are expansive and very detailed, but not at all realistic. The gore is sloppy and gross, but exists at sub-Troma levels of good looking.  But at the same time, it’s consistent, and I wonder if it was all some elaborate straight-faced joke. Aside from the obvious going out of their way to blow up landmarks and the spider giving a speech, everything is played out as a serious matter. Still, at the same time for all its faults, I’m impressed at the amount of set-ups and spider attack gags they attempt. The people behind this movie were dedicated, I’ll give them that.

Is this a movie for everyone? No? Is this a movie for anyone? Probably not.  If you are giant monster movie completest or maybe you just love stuff blowing up, proceed at your own risk.

Creepies 2 has to be better right?

Right?