Creature of Darkness (2009)

Too much of everything

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

A group of teenagers camps in an area nearby a military base. Soon they are chased by an alien that hunts them down. The disturbed Andrew (Devon Sawa), who is haunted by nightmares, recalls the words of his uncle, Major Victor Devorshak (Matt Lattimore) that was a pilot that claimed that had been abducted by an alien called The Catcher (Phil Van Tee) and ended his days in a mental institution. Andrew tells that The Catcher kills humans to stock them for the winter. Further, his uncle had advised him to never go to that area during the night, but his friend Esther had convince him to come to the place to get over his nightmares. Now they have to fight back to survive."Creature of Darkness" is a pathetic movie, with lame story, direction, screenplay, acting, special effects, makeup and location. I am a fan of B-movies, especially from the 50's and early 60's, and I expected that "Creature of Darkness" was this sort of movie when I bought the imported DVD. Unfortunately, the plot is and awful rip-off of "Predator", but with unpleasant characters and stupid situations. My vote is two.Title (Brazil): Not Available (fortunately)

The monster of a man's recurring nightmare turns out to be real when he and his friends go on a weekend cycling trip to a remote area.I simply could not believe how low this film was rated on IMDb, coming in at a depressing 2.8. Come on, people, this movie has Devon Sawa, the kid who played Casper and starred in both "Idle Hands" and the under-appreciated "Devil's Den". I think seeing Sawa's face alone must be worth a third star out of ten.Okay, so some of that last paragraph was sarcastic. This film is slow, boring, and the whole story is pretty stupid. Even the title, "Creature of Darkness", shows very little imagination. This film would have been better had they intentionally tried to make it bad.

Not overwhelmingly original, this movie packs quite a punch for a low-budget feature, despite a superficial similarity to Predator and other slasher films. The similarity to Predator is due to the green filtered scenes presumably showing the alien's point of view. I thought the alien, with a few humanoid features and creepy claws, was truly frightening as he appeared on the crest of a hill on an October full moon night. I give the director full credit for this. The dialog reveals that October is an especially bad time to be in this area of the desert. As the film's special features reveal, the alien was constructed for maximum ugly and sinister impact. Not as physically bulky as Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, the alien catcher is seven feet tall, and lean and mean.It is true that this is a "B" movie that has little in the way of character development, but there was a Western/horror movie last year called "The Burrowers" that was similar and that I would also recommend. The movie is carefully constructed with about 8 20 -year- olds driving their all-terrain vehicles into a remote desert for a weekend of partying, with flashbacks to an alien abduction some time previous. The dialog is also for the most part much better than average and the characters are all good looking specimens, the better for the alien to capture. One of the male characters has had a series of recurring bad dreams regarding his schizoid uncle's stories of abduction. Part of the reason for the weekend getaway is for his friends to "cure" the dreamer of his presumed illusions. The alien also has the ability to create sinkholes which disappear after capturing their victims, so his quarry cannot escape. He has a mountain lair where he stores his victims in glass cages prior to abduction. He also spits green gobs of goo, and uses a human spine dislodged from a previous victim, and also a snake as slingshot weapons. His spacecraft looks like an evil insect. There are a number of confrontations between human and alien and eventually the teenagers ingeniously contrive to blow up one of their all terrain vehicles when the alien approaches. As one might expect, after the characters douse the alien with gasoline and light it, the alien survives, only half-alive, but with enough life to get back to his spacecraft. All in all I thought this little movie had quite a bit going for it because it's unique and doesn't carry a lot of "sequel baggage" unlike the endless repetitive sequels of the Friday 13th or Halloween films.

Basically, this is a terrible movie. The acting is probably the worst part, not surprising with actors I have never heard of before. Even Devon Sawa, who I have seen in past movies and was usually an OK actor, is really bad. The dialogue is some of the most clichéd and ridiculous I have heard in a movie. In particular, the dancing scene early in the movie where the girls talk about the guys, unbelievable.The effects in the movie are not too bad considering what I assume was a low budget. The "creature of the dark" is surprisingly good and definitely the best actor in the movie.Not a movie I would recommend to anyone.