CreatureofDarkness

Creature of Darkness (2009)

This is your pretty standard creature feature. Basically after establishing that there is an alien running around doing bad things to people the movie introduces us to a group of twenty somethings running around on their ATVs and partying. They of course run afoul of the Alien, who is visiting Earth looking for specimens for Alien Zoos. How do we know this? Well it seems that a couple of the partygoers have alternate motivations for the trip. One of them has been having nightmares based on a story his crazy uncle told him about Aliens kidnapping him. After removing his tattoos the Aliens told him all about a nasty hunter who visited Earth, or at least was going to visit in the future. Which was somehow their past due to the time traveling effects of the speed of light. Not sure how that works, but the science isn’t important. What is important is that the hunter runs around picking them off one at a time until they hatch an elaborate plot to kill it. When that plot fails they just kick it’s ass.

Okay I don’t ask much from my monster movies. Plop a nasty critter down and have it do bad things to the locals. I’m all good with that. Unfortunately Creature of Darkness tries to get clever and have a complicated plot involving dreams and time travel. Maybe with a better script it might have worked, but here it just gets in the way. The movie does try really hard to establish the characters and create some back-story for them, but it doesn’t work at all. So much of the movie then ends up being really boring and pointless. Even when the movie does get down to the alien picking off it’s victims there are huge plot holes. For example as they are trying to make their escape they go from driving down the road trying to avoid these sinkholes opening up in front of them to back at camp. There is some attempt made to say that they will try the morning when they can see the holes, but it is just very awkward. Oh and the movie also has them wandering off alone again and again, after knowing that something is stalking and killing them! My favorite one is when for no apparent reason after finding one of their friends dead they decide to wait 10 minutes before leaving. Really please don’t insult my intelligence. Again I don’t expect a classic, but this is just dumb.

A bad script with plot holes is only made worse by a cast that isn’t very good. Not trying to be mean here but several of the cast spend the entire movie shouting at each other. And the scenes where they are trying to fight with each other looks more like a high school play then a feature film. This isn’t the only common foible of low budget movie making that Creature of Darkness suffers from. The music feels very generic and uninspired. It just doesn’t fit either the overall mood of the movie, nor the particular scenes that it blares over. The one thing that the movie had going for it was the practical effects and the look of the creature. They had a really clever plot point where the alien would cover up in the clothes of it’s victims. So there was this creepy figure stalking around the woods, which worked nicely. Plus they had a sweet looking prosthetic head and arms to work with. But then towards the end they decided to have the creature running around in full CGI, which looked terrible. Totally ruined it for me.

Creatures of Darkness is a bland, generic movie that has little going for it. I will give it some credit for the creature design and early execution, but overall I’d say avoid this one.

1 ½ out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer