Creature (1998)

Good start, but then it gets ruined

Critics,are you kidding us

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

I first saw this movie on TV, I missed the beginning of it, then I got it and watch it again, I enjoyed it. I read lots of reviews that said it was not good, I found it nice and good, the creature is good and I really enjoyed, but I can say that few times the acting was not to the level required, it could have been better, but this is a movie, I enjoyed it and do recommend it to others and I do disagree with others regarding the bad reviews, it should be good...... watch and enjoy!!!

I'm guessing that Hallmark's TV miniseries version of Peter Benchley's THE BEAST was successful enough for them to commission this follow-up series, about a government-created half-man half-fish monster that not only kills people in the water but on land too. It sounds preposterous and it is, but in the hands of Hallmark it's a ponderous and slowly-paced affair, lacking the same kind of atmosphere as THE BEAST (which at least recalled JAWS favourably at times). This one's content to rip off ALIENS for all of the main action scenes, and although cast members Kim Cattrall, Craig T. Nelson, and Colm Feore try their hardest and Stan Winston's effects are, as ever, fantastic, it's middling at best.

If you need a good laugh, here's the comedy for you.Let's start with the characters, which are all stereotypes or over-the-top whack jobs. After 25 years of not doing anything, an escaped mutant beast finally decides to eat something, so mutilated corpses start floating to the surface on the beaches of a Caribbean island. No sea monster movie is complete without the dumb local cop who ignores a scientist's warnings about the problem. The idiot teen angst son who just keeps getting in his Daddy's hair, needs to be put on time out. Local voodoo dancers that look like they're practicing for a primal scream contest. Military with enough fire power to blast the Western Hemisphere to rubble, but if brains were dynamite, they wouldn't have enough to blow their noses.But the best is the paranoid beach comber ex-scientist (who didn't age at all in 25 years). I love his "under the canoe" playhouse, where he stares wide-eyed at anything he sees, and whines incoherent gibberish hysterically.There really was a decent original idea for a story, but the director throws so much extra stuff at you, it's buried under a Caribbean Sea of dead-end sub plots and meaningless banter. The story suggests an evil secret involving the creature, but instead of exploring this, you'll just see pointless padding, like the romance with an island beauty liking the knucklehead kid. The two scientists rekindling their dead marriage serves no purpose either.I pity Craig T. Nelson, who took the thing seriously, and tried to make the most of his character. The director is to blame for the weak construction of the film which ends up being unintentionally funny. There are a few good moments involving the creature, but not enough. Most of the time you'll see the increasingly obvious red dye to simulate an attack, or the beast standing two feet away from a victim staring dumbly. Entertaining stuff, but as comedy, not horror.

This movie should never have been released, it's an absolute failure on all levels except for some of the acting. You'll find yourself cringing at seeing recognizable actors in a movie this worthless, I can't imagine that anyone associated with the making of this movie ever brings that fact up on their resume. I had assumed that Peter Benchley had some talent as a writer after seeing Jaws, but I guess he was just a one-hit-wonder. It is too bad that he didn't have the sense to burn the manuscript and take up wood carving instead. Give the "Creature" a shiny sword and he could be a monster of the week on the Power Rangers. The movie could have worked as a comedy if they had at least sped things up a bit, it is so slow and tedious that it can't even be enjoyed as a B-movie train wreck.