Details: Written by: John Colianni; Published: 04 January 2015

Creeper Movie Review

Written and directed by Matthew Gunnoe
2012, 94 minutes, Not Rated

Starring:
Darryl Baldwin as Jerry Tobin
Monica Chambers as Erica
Tara Price as Heather
Brittney Cardella as Dana

Review:

The internet is a fantastic and wonderfully fascinating thing. Imagine for just a moment how your current life would be without seemingly endless information at your fingertips. Whether you're checking local traffic for your commute to work or researching that weird rash you've obtained from last week's one night stand, we as people, for the most part, rely and depend on being online all the time. Most of the time this omniscient access is being used for good, whether that is on an individual level or for bettering humanity. The rest of it is a mixture of porn and trolls. While I owe a lot to the the world wide web (I've met best friends, gotten a job and met my girlfriend all online), there are a multitude of reasons to be skeptical of it. No matter how convincing and genuine some people present themselves, not everyone is who they say they are. Along with the kindhearted people of the world, the internet now gives all sorts of predatory people access to everyone else. And that brings us to part of the plot line of writer/director Matthew Gunnoe's Creeper.

One night, Heather and her friends decide to get into some mischief on the internet, using the popular site ConnectMeNet, which connects random users to one another via webcam, audio and text. To their surprise and amusement, they are connected with Jerry Tobin, a lonely and psychologically vulnerable war veteran also looking to meet strangers online. Things quickly take a turn for the worse as the girls take advantage of Jerry's vulnerabilities and begin to convince him to perform a variety of humiliating acts. Even more sinister, they have now decided that Jerry is so below them as a human being, they want to meet up with him face to face and kill him. Only after this will they truly regret toying with him at all.

Creeper's story has a fresh premise that if executed correctly could be both eerie, bloody and fun. Unfortunately there isn't a whole lot that transferred from paper to a big screen that works well. The main issues with Creeper are how abysmal the acting and dialogue are. I completely understand that independent films and production houses work on very limited budgets to create their ideas into a working movie, but if the actors that they have in the roles aren't convincing or if the dialogue they're provided with seems less natural than an episode of Bang Bus, it's going to be dead on arrival. Along with that, for a movie that has a running time of over 90 minutes, there isn't a whole lot going on. Heather and her friends are overly bitchy and that's completely fine, but them wanting to all of a sudden kill Jerry forces the plot and offers no real reason as to why they want to commit murder. Also, Jerry is literally one of the most one-dimensional characters that has ever been created. You know he is child-like and on medication and that's all the information that writer/director Matthew Gunnoe saw fit to give viewers. By the time the climax and end of the film came around, I couldn't care less what happened to any of the characters. There is nothing worse than an indifferent audience.

When it could have been a genuinely disturbing and unsettling, Creeper is nothing more than boring and at many moments cringe-worthy to sit through. Come to think of it, the title Creeper doesn't make much sense for a film about a vulnerable man being manipulated and tortured by a bunch of evil 20-something chicks. Films like this should heed a warning to all users of the internet to never trust someone on the other end, no matter who they are and what they may be promising. All Creeper made we want to do is drive down to a local bar and throat punch the first snooty chick wearing Uggs and leggings that I come across. If you're looking for scary and disturbing flick that will leave you questioning who to trust, check out Disturbia. Or Debbie Does Dallas, since that has more of a compelling plot and characters.