Creep (1995)

Posted on Sep 14, 2005 under Action-suspense, Exploitation, Horror |

Written and directed by Tim Ritter
Starring
- Kathy Willets
- Joel D. Wynkoop
- Tom Karr
- Patricia Paul
- Dika Newlin

As long as commercial cinema entertainment has been around, there have been do-it-yourself filmmakers, people who worked outside the studio system and the established distribution routes who made movies to be shown in all sorts of alternative or co-optable locales — drive-ins, arthouse theaters, or as a last resort a sheet hung for the projector on the wall of a rented hall.

It was still true, though, that cinema is the most expensive of the creative arts (with the possible exception of architecture). Music can be jotted down and plunked out on any number of readily-available instruments; novels require nothing but some paper and a tool to mark the paper. But film has always required, well, film. And a movie camera. That’s over and above whatever costs are involved in staging whatever is meant to take place in front of the camera.

Thus, one of most noteworthy results of the introduction of consumer-grade and consumer-affordable video cameras (aside from the proliferation of really cheap porn) was the “micro-budget filmmaker” revolution. Recording audio and video no longer required massive outlays and forgiving investors; however crude, the means of committing an audiovisual narrative in permanent form lay within the grasp of the hobbyist. It’s still usually more expensive to make a feature-length video than to paint a landscape or compose a cycle of sonnets, but the price tag had still dropped low enough that the idea of “the democratization of cinema” was no longer laughable: Something that looked and sounded pretty much like a movie could be financed on individual resources.

Florida-based moviemaker Tim Ritter is one of the granddaddies of the micro-budget, shot-on-video field, and he realized at the outset of his career back in the ’80s that he still needed to compensate for the obvious deficiencies of self-financed video over studio-financed film. As those porn producers also learned, the way to make video-based production feasible wasn’t to attempt to recreate what production companies were doing with several more zeroes in their budgets; it was to provide a vision that those corporate filmmaking bodies weren’t producing. Yes, I could be speaking of “individual vision,” which is another one of the separators between movies and other solo-artist fields; despite the pretensions of the auteur theory, moviemaking is a heavily collaborative craft, and the idea that a movie bears the fingerprints of its director to the same degree that a novel bears the marks of its author is simply ludicrous; at best, a movie could be said to retain some diffuse influence of its director which can be felt at varying strengths through each of the disciplines to whose practitioners the director is forced to delegate. But even a micro-budget movie is a collaborative enterprise, and anyway, “individual vision” is responsible for those scores of art-indie film-school projects which no one but the director and his mom ever want to watch.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Rowdy Roddy Piper!

No, Ritter saw that his output would have to be transgressive if it were to find a niche beyond the purvue of the more polished productions. Or, as those porn producers would have recognized the concept, he had to be exploitative.

Which brings me, after 500 words, to the subject of scrutiny today: Ritter’s 1995 “cult classic,” Creep, which promises sex and violence from the get-go. That it delivers on those elements is not open to dispute; how well they mesh into a good (if cheap) movie requires further discussion.

Just to get us off on the right foot, our prologue has a drugged mother and her strung-out manfriend pushing her son Angus into “bad touching” his sister in front of an 8mm camera. Don’t worry, we actually see NO children during the course of this scene, just the camera in Mom’s hands staring at us. But it’s still plenty disturbing to hear the adults ranting “Touch your sister!” and “Be a good sissy!” for several minutes. And the severed head they toss around doesn’t relax the ambience.

In other words, it’s absolutlely no surprise that Angus grows up to be deeply, royally, completely screwed up.

When next we meet Angus Lynch, he’s an adult (Joel D. Wynkoop, who has parlayed his role in this movie into a sort of bizarre celebrity status among microbudget filmmakers and fans) in a bright orange jumpsuit, being transported between Florida prison facilities. A car crash on a lonely road gives Angus a chance to escape his police escort, and after killing the one live cop who tries to tail him, he’s officially free from prison, with some grudges to settle and some psychoses to indulge.

Even kick-ass lady cops have a cuddly-cute side, I guess.

Meanwhile, young lady cop Jackie Ketchum (Patricia Paul) suits up for another day of busting perps and the like. It seems that Jackie’s main law enforcement training has been a steady diet of Dirty Harry movies; when she finds a sociopathic woman (Dika Newlin) mixing poison into baby food bottles on a grocery store shelf, she gets all steely-eyed and makes the suspect eat her own handiwork. Kind of unusual in uniformed patrol officers; you usually have to make detective and start wearing your own clothes to work before you can let your attitude handle your firearm, then walk away without doing any paperwork.

Jackie’s got her own inner turmoil; she’s haunted by the memories of her mother being stabbed by a mugger when she was little, and even the protective presence of her father, the world’s most laid back police captain (Tom Karr), does little to ease her flashbacks.

Now, I’ll tell you right now: Angus’ story and Jackie’s story aren’t going to intersect for a long, long time. So get used to switching back and forth.

Let’s see. Angus wastes no time in getting back to form. He finds a secluded church for shelter, and murders a homeless wino for his clothes and collection of bladed weapons. Then, with that unerring Serial Killer Radar, he finds a young couple screwing in their car in the woods and kills them both for their wheels.

How better to follow that than with a trip to see one’s stripper-sister? So Angus stops by to watch his sister Kascha (Kathy Willets) show everyone the godawful things that some quack plastic surgeon attached to her chest. Now, I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I don’t much like breast implants that look like implants instead of breasts, but these cantaloupe-sized subdermal contraptions turn my dislike into utter revulsion. They look more like googie-era hood ornaments than mammary glands. And combined with an over-aerobicized figure and skin made leathery by decades of cigarettes and other hard-livin,’ Willets qualifies as one stripper that I would pay to stay clothed.

“So… you watch much Italian cinema?”

After a few moments of catching up, Angus discovers that Kascha’s current husband Donny is a little too abusive for his tastes, so Angus hitches a ride to Kascha’s home to meet him. Donny (Lenny Blythe Jr.) looks like Dom Deluise’s less-polished brother, and acts so repulsive that Angus almost looks like a hero for gutting him with a hunting knife.

Jackie’s day, meanwhile, hasn’t been nearly as productive. She has to turn in her badge and gun to day while on mandatory suspension for her convenience-store trick. Then she drops in on her boyfriend Graham’s apartment, just barely missing the extended striptease his new girlfriend-on-the-side performed for him before they both ended up in the hottub. Oh yay, two stripteases not ten minutes apart. At least the teaser in this case is fifteen years younger than Kathy Willet, and her skin still looks like skin instead of naugahyde. But still. I don’t know from experience, but I gotta suspect that maybe a striptease is something you really have to see in person to appreciate, since I’ve never seen one in a low-budget movie that aroused more than my thumb on the fast-forward button.

So. Angus and Kascha decide that a life of perverse crime would be hunky-dory, so they terrorize another couple in the woods (this time, Angus is decked out in drag), then dig up their mother’s corpse from the cemetery just so Angus can hurl abuse at her. Then brother and sister decide that an open grave would be a terrific location to play some of those “games” that Mom forced upon them as kids… but in the middle, Angus slices open Kascha’s throat instead.

Back in our other storyline, Jackie’s a wee bit paranoid, since her dad originally put Angus away, and serial killers are notorious for coming back for revenge. She only meets up with a small-time rapist she helped convict (Dan “Rattlehead” Cleveland), and she’s more than a match for him, but still, her suspension plus her breakup plus those incessant flashbacks to her mother’s murder are taking their toll upon her, so Dad suggests she go up to “the retreat” (I’m not sure if this is their family cabin, or a police-owned facility) and he’ll join her once he’s put the department to bed.

Ick. Ick ick ick. Ick.

Unfortunately, Captain Ketchum has other things in mind when he gets there; he bashes Jackie over the head with a vase and ties her to the bed. Why? Mostly because he’s worried that her amnesia is fading, and she’s about to remember that it was he who killed Mommy, because she was about to report him to his superiors for being abusive. (As luck or plot mechanics would have it, Jackie only flashes back to a complete recall of that day, including her father’s face under the ski mask, while she’s knocked out cold from Dad’s blow. Oh, the irony!)

And finally, our two storylines intersect as Angus shows up — at Dad’s invitation. See, Dad arranged for the prisoner transfer and the crash that gave Angus his freedom, on the condition that he show up to kill his troubling daughter and thus provide Dad an alibi. Of course, serial killers are notoriously unreliable employees, and Angus decides to kill Dad instead, then leaves Jackie alive when he’s struck by the parallels in their lives — both screwed over by parents who done them wrong.

But that’s scarcely a satisfactory conclusion, so instead we get another one that’s… not much better, really. Jackie cuts her hair to be unrecognizable, tracks Angus for four months, then shows up in his apartment with a mountain of plastic explosives and brings the building down on top of them. The end.

I hope I don’t need to point out to you that, even ignoring the primitive technical aspects of a movie with this limited a budget, we’re not talking about a good movie here. The formless succession of events presented to us can scarcely be called a plot, and our nominal protagonist Jackie really doesn’t do anything, or even participate noticeably in the story until the last ten minutes. And those last ten minutes are themselves especially problematic; the footage of the building crashing down obviously resulted from a legitimate demolition that Ritter captured on video and found a way to use, but couldn’t it have been worked into the story (or a story) a little more organically? As it is, having Jackie blow up an entire apartment building just to kill Angus and herself means that, when our pseudo-protagonist finally actually does something, it’s a self-centered and irrational act that takes the lives of probably dozens of innocent co-tenants.

Who do you trust to perform YOUR Lasik surgery?

That having been said, the movie does fulfill its requirement of transgressive elements. Wynkoop’s performance as Angus is always fun to watch; I can’t very well gauge his abilities as an actor because playing such an over-the-top, irrational character can hardly be alled “acting,” but it still means that the scenes involving our messed-up serial killer are more interesting than those involving our milque-toast, wanna-be-tough protagonist.

I would call Kathy Willets’ boob job “transgressive” in and of itself, but apparently there’s a market for that kind of thing. What a world.