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Creep:
The important thing to know before you watch this, much more important than knowing the quality of Creep, is to know the genre. Creep is a dark comedy that plays as a satire of found footage horror films. I read a few comments on IMDB because I knew this was divisive, and a lot of people are complaining about plot holes and moronic actions by the main character. That's the joke. You can think that joke isn't funny, but do not watch Creep expecting a dark and tense horror film and then complain that it was stupid and the plot was contrived. A satire plays things up to their extremes in order to make fun of them. Horror has plenty of subgenres, maybe more so than any other genre of film. Found footage is probably my least favorite, but my favorite is the Scream (or more recently Cabin In The Woods) style of trope-subverting horror comedies. Those 2 examples get to have their cake and eat it, too. They function both as funny and smart satires of horror and tense and scary horror. Creep isn't quite that ambitious. It has no interest in actually being scary. That's not such a bad thing, but you need to have your expectations in line. The first time I watched it, I was really disappointed. On second viewing, knowing what it was, I enjoyed it a lot more, so go into your first viewing looking for a twisted comedy.
Creep is a personal project between two people. Mark Duplass is the writer, producer, and star of the movie, and Patrick Brice is all of those things plus the director. Brice plays Aaron, a poor man who gets a job as a cameraman for Duplass' character Josef. Josef wants Aaron to film his life to show to his baby because he will die of cancer in 2 months. These are the only 2 actors that appear in the movie, so it's very important that they do a great job. Brice does fine, but Duplass really excels. Part of that is that he had a much more interesting character to play and was in front of the camera for a longer time, but Duplass really nails it. I won't give away the real motivation or character of Josef, but he isn't what he seems. He's a really creepy and disturbing guy that's hiding his real reasoning for wanting Aaron around. He not only has a wolf mask, but has a name for it (Peachfuzz). No sane person does that, and Duplass is not entirely sane, but the interesting thing is that he's not entirely insane, either.
Unfortunately, the shortcoming of the found footage genre rears its ugly head. No matter how good or bad the film is, and no matter how intentional or lazy the camera work is, the cinematography still looks like garbage. The lighting is poor, there's no shot variety, and the frame has a ridiculous amount of dead space. The movie tells you when a scare is coming, so the time it takes to find it becomes dreadfully boring. It's 30 seconds of waving the camera around, and the audience sees absolutely nothing of relevance. It's just looking at a moving picture of trees or the hallways of a house before the thing jumps out.
The film is short at 80 minutes, and it struggles to fill even that time. Josef doesn't make an appearance until about 10 minutes into the movie. You could just hit the delete button on that entire segment in the editing room and nobody would be worse off for it. It's just Brice giving out lazy exposition while the camera shows nature through the window of a car. This segment is especially useless because all of this exposition is slowly revealed to us anyways. Every single line is either pointless or is used again once Josef enters.
This is a hard film to talk about, because a lot of the enjoyment to be had from it comes in the last 10 minutes, when everything gets pieced together. I don't want to give away that part, which means I can't talk about a lot of the good stuff, but I can say that the bad points I've mentioned are really small and don't make the movie significantly worse. Basically every scene in the third act has some kind of twist, and the absurdity keeps on building while simultaneously giving the plot interesting developments. Unfortunately, I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. The jokes are subtle, the type that are more clever than funny. I don't want to sound snobby and say that some people won't get it, but you need to have seen a fair share of horror movies to pick up on everything. A decent portion of the humor isn't even dialogue, it's playing with trope formulas. Not being familiar with those formulas probably makes it a boring way to kill an hour. If you think you might like it, you will. If not, you might want to check it out, but ultimately its only as funny as you let it be.
Creep:
The important thing to know before you watch this, much more important than knowing the quality of Creep, is to know the genre. Creep is a dark comedy that plays as a satire of found footage horror films. I read a few comments on IMDB because I knew this was divisive, and a lot of people are complaining about plot holes and moronic actions by the main character. That's the joke. You can think that joke isn't funny, but do not watch Creep expecting a dark and tense horror film and then complain that it was stupid and the plot was contrived. A satire plays things up to their extremes in order to make fun of them. Horror has plenty of subgenres, maybe more so than any other genre of film. Found footage is probably my least favorite, but my favorite is the Scream (or more recently Cabin In The Woods) style of trope-subverting horror comedies. Those 2 examples get to have their cake and eat it, too. They function both as funny and smart satires of horror and tense and scary horror. Creep isn't quite that ambitious. It has no interest in actually being scary. That's not such a bad thing, but you need to have your expectations in line. The first time I watched it, I was really disappointed. On second viewing, knowing what it was, I enjoyed it a lot more, so go into your first viewing looking for a twisted comedy.
Creep is a personal project between two people. Mark Duplass is the writer, producer, and star of the movie, and Patrick Brice is all of those things plus the director. Brice plays Aaron, a poor man who gets a job as a cameraman for Duplass' character Josef. Josef wants Aaron to film his life to show to his baby because he will die of cancer in 2 months. These are the only 2 actors that appear in the movie, so it's very important that they do a great job. Brice does fine, but Duplass really excels. Part of that is that he had a much more interesting character to play and was in front of the camera for a longer time, but Duplass really nails it. I won't give away the real motivation or character of Josef, but he isn't what he seems. He's a really creepy and disturbing guy that's hiding his real reasoning for wanting Aaron around. He not only has a wolf mask, but has a name for it (Peachfuzz). No sane person does that, and Duplass is not entirely sane, but the interesting thing is that he's not entirely insane, either.
Unfortunately, the shortcoming of the found footage genre rears its ugly head. No matter how good or bad the film is, and no matter how intentional or lazy the camera work is, the cinematography still looks like garbage. The lighting is poor, there's no shot variety, and the frame has a ridiculous amount of dead space. The movie tells you when a scare is coming, so the time it takes to find it becomes dreadfully boring. It's 30 seconds of waving the camera around, and the audience sees absolutely nothing of relevance. It's just looking at a moving picture of trees or the hallways of a house before the thing jumps out.
The film is short at 80 minutes, and it struggles to fill even that time. Josef doesn't make an appearance until about 10 minutes into the movie. You could just hit the delete button on that entire segment in the editing room and nobody would be worse off for it. It's just Brice giving out lazy exposition while the camera shows nature through the window of a car. This segment is especially useless because all of this exposition is slowly revealed to us anyways. Every single line is either pointless or is used again once Josef enters.
This is a hard film to talk about, because a lot of the enjoyment to be had from it comes in the last 10 minutes, when everything gets pieced together. I don't want to give away that part, which means I can't talk about a lot of the good stuff, but I can say that the bad points I've mentioned are really small and don't make the movie significantly worse. Basically every scene in the third act has some kind of twist, and the absurdity keeps on building while simultaneously giving the plot interesting developments. Unfortunately, I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. The jokes are subtle, the type that are more clever than funny. I don't want to sound snobby and say that some people won't get it, but you need to have seen a fair share of horror movies to pick up on everything. A decent portion of the humor isn't even dialogue, it's playing with trope formulas. Not being familiar with those formulas probably makes it a boring way to kill an hour. If you think you might like it, you will. If not, you might want to check it out, but ultimately its only as funny as you let it be.