While I like creature movies in general, I only like good ones. This movie has no business trying theatrical distribution. Its distributor is going to lose millions.
The movie is basically the same quality and mentality as what you might see produced by Roger Corman or Charles Band, which are dirt-budget cheaply written ride-the-trend productions. To their credit they launch careers for actors and filmmakers trying to get their first break, but the products are horrible.
The Corman / Band era is over, however. Until the 90's, movies like that could take advantage of the fact that nobody knew they sucked until it was too late. Word of mouth was only as good as your local community. Today we have the internet, where everyone with at least one finger and a brain stem can bang out their reaction to a movie and send it up to a site where it gets visibility. Thousands of viewers can rate movies at many sites, such as IMDb, Yahoo Movies, Fandango, Flix, Hulu, etc. This averages out to an overall audience reaction, despite idiots who give everything they see one star or those who give everything they see "all" stars. This rapid response medium spreads the word so fast that after just a day or two of release, I can see that hundreds or even thousands of people have averaged a movie to 4 stars out of 10, and that means I should steer clear of it.
(Obviously it didn't work with me this time because I'm one of those rare persons who doesn't pay much attention to the opinions of others.) The cost of distributing a movie to the theater is ENORMOUS. It is harder to distribute a movie to a US theater than it is to raise millions of dollars to produce it in the first place. With Blu-Ray on the rise, and the increasing popularity of using the internet to stream movies, theatrical distribution is riskier than ever.
I suppose the distributor of Creature figured the time was ripe. It's the second deep-south swamp horror to come out this month, the other being Shark Night, which was marginally better (but not a good bet either). I suppose they were inspired by the surprise success of Piranha 3D, which had a lot of star cameo power, a lot of gore, a lot of nudity, and a lot of fun. All Creature had was a little nudity, and that's just not enough. The plot was confusing, the characters were ridiculously unbelievable, and the creature costume was even worse than Swamp Thing 20 years ago.
Seriously, guys. College students can make a better film than this.
