PLOT: A videographer (Desiree Akhavan) travels to a remote cabin in the woods, where a man claiming to be a serial killer (Mark Duplass) asks her to make a documentary about his crimes.
REVIEW: Patrick Brice’s CREEP had a strange road to cult status. Originally a festival hit that drew raves at SXSW in 2014 (I saw it at Fantasia that summer) it quickly got snapped up by the-then up-and-coming Radius, a VOD company owned by The Weinstein Bros that hasn’t put anything out in over a year (and is unlikely to do so anytime soon for obvious reasons), only to languish for over a year in limbo. In 2015, it finally got a short VOD window via The Orchard, before a Netflix premiere that same year. A sequel was supposed to immediately follow, but it’s taken over two years since the eventual release for us to finally get one.
Like the original, it’s micro-budget found-footage, without any bells and whistles – even for the genre. The DV look is almost antiquated given how far the technology has come, but like the first, it succeeds on the merits of Brice and star Mark Duplass’s mumblecore aesthetic, a genre they’ve got down cold (with Brice’s THE OVERNIGHT possibly the best mumblecore movie that’s been made to this point).
This picks up where the first left off, with Duplass’s Aaron, now fully revealed as a serial killer, again pursuing victims, only for an unlikely midlife crisis to hit as he nears his fortieth birthday. With a fresh kill on his brain (an early scene depicting it is gorier than anything in the first film), he invites an aspiring videographer to his home to film his confession in a bizarre piece of performance art. He swears he’s not going to kill her, but the woman, played by Desiree Akhavan, is more formidable than his typical victims. Besides, she doesn’t think he’s a killer anyway, and the film focuses entirely around their give-and-take, with each using the other in a way (she hopes to exploit his weirdness in a viral video).
The new gender dynamic improves the premise, which wore thin in the first, giving the sequel a charge the other didn’t have, with Akhavan’s character subverting his attempts to victimize her at every turn, and her, to an extent, messing with his head just as much as he does hers. Like the original, it’s as much a comedy as it is a horror film, although the violence, when it hits, is unmerciful and packs a wallop.
At eighty minutes, and done on a shoestring, CREEP 2 certainly doesn’t warrant a trip to the theater, but if you’re a fan of the first, it’s a solid VOD rental. It’s also accessible for those who haven’t seen the original. It does its own thing in the end, and while the appeal is limited, it occupies its niche in the genre quite well.