Creep (film)
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| Creep | |
|---|---|
 Creep film poster |
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| Directed by | Christopher Smith |
| Produced by | Jason Newmark, Julie Baines |
| Written by | Christopher Smith |
| Starring | Franka Potente, Ken Campbell, Sean Harris |
| Distributed by | Pathé Distribution |
| Release date(s) | January 28, 2005 |
| Running time | 85 min |
| Language | English |
| Budget | 35 Million |
| IMDb profile | |
Creep (2004) is a British slasher film directed by Christopher Smith, starring the German actress Franka Potente.
Potente plays Kate, a young woman who is trapped overnight on the London Underground after falling asleep on a platform and missing the last train she intended to catch. The film also features Vas Blackwood and Ken Campbell as sewage workers George and Arthur, Jeremy Sheffield as Guy, and Paul Rattray and Kelly Scott as the homeless couple Jimmy and Mandy.
The film debuted at the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival and also featured at the London Fright Fest.
The director has indicated the subtext of the film is Kate's search for love — through the film she encounters a number of men, including the killer, but is socially unacceptable for some reason. The film plays with the audience's sympathies for the characters: the heroine Kate comes across as unlikeable at times, whilst the 'evil' characters get moments of sympathy.
Many aspects of the storyline bear a striking resemblance to the 1972 film Death Line, although Smith has claimed to have never seen the earlier film. [1]
Contents |
[edit] Story
Two sewage workers, Arthur and George, are in the sewers beneath London. (George is in fact just there because he has to serve community service because of his drug dealing.) They discover a new tunnel, and we see them attacked by some unknown horror. The film then follows Kate, a popular German party girl living in London, as she travels between parties. At one party, she brags to her friends that she knows where George Clooney is staying in London. She sets off to get his autograph (and perhaps even more). Intending to catch the tube, she falls asleep on the platform at Charing Cross and misses the last train. Though finding that the station has been closed for the night and that she is locked inside, she sees a train pulling into the station.
On board, she encounters Guy, an unwanted acquaintance from the last party. When he attempts to rape her, something pulls him out of the train's door and brutally attacks him. Kate runs away in panic and encounters a homeless couple, Jimmy and Mandy, who have made their home in a small room at the station, where they live with their little Jack Russell dog, Ray. She tells them what has happened and pays Jimmy to go with her to the security supervisor, so that he can let her out. As Kate and Jimmy chat along the way, Jimmy says that the "thing" that attacked Guy might have been the same creature that's been creeping around at night killing homeless people. Only to then say that he's joking. Unfortunately, he doesn't know how that this urban myth is true; Mandy, whilst waiting for Kate and Jimmy to come back, encounters something which makes her shriek with terror...
Kate and Jimmy spot Guy, lying on the railway track, bleeding to death. Although he tried to rape her, Kate still wants to help him, and pays Jimmy again to lift Guy into safety. Jimmy, however, is less sympathetic, and can't understand how Kate can want to help him. After Guy is pulled up on the platform, Jimmy spots Ray, with blood smeared over his fur. Jimmy is alarmed, as he understands that something must have happened to Mandy. He runs off, leaving Kate alone with Guy. She rings the bell to the office of the supervisor, and tells him that she's locked inside, and that she needs an ambulance for Guy. The supervisor refuses to call anyone unless Kate confirms that. An angry Kate pulls Guy's already dead body into view for the camera. The startled supervisor then discovers a pack of rats inside his office. Then two grey arms come up from behind and slit his throat with a knife. Kate hears his screams and runs back to Jimmy's and Mandy's hideout. Meanwhile, whoever the grey arms belong to drags the bodies of Guy and the supervisor into the railway tunnel. Kate finds a devastated Jimmy whom she first can't make contact with. Then they head off into the tunnel. A train arrives, and the two run out of the way, into a hole in the wall. Jimmy thinks the traindriver might have killed Mandy, and runs into the train with a crowbar to do the same thing to him, after telling Kate to take Ray and go. He finds the driver dead on the floor. Kate continues into the sewer system, but then runs back, into the train. Inside, she sees how the two grey arms come down from the space between two train carts, grab Jimmy's head and lift it up between the carts. Jimmy twitches, then falls down, dead. Kate screams with terror, and runs into the sewers and into some kind of storage room. Whoever killed Guy, the supervisor and Jimmy appears to be following her. The lights go out, and Kate sits down in a corner and puts out her flashlight, terrified, in an attempt to hide from her mysterious stalker. As she turns on the torchlight again, a hideous, deformed, face stares back at her. The face of her stalker is Craig, the "creep", a mentally ill cannibalistic hermit, who lives in the sewage system. Kate screams with terror and everything goes black.
Then we can see Craig, who obviously knows the sewer system very well, as he goes down to a his storage of "food", i.e. human beings. He keeps them in cages, partly under water. There is George, the sewage worker, who is still alive. Craig pokes at him with a long metal bar that he uses as a a spear. George grouchily informs Craig that he's not dead. Kate is there too. Craig must have knocked her unconscious. After Craig has left with a dead body, Kate and George talk to each other between their cages, presenting each other and discuss how they're gonna get out of there. Kate swims underneath the cages and manages to get out. Then Craig appears. He wants to get George. Kate sneaks up from behind and stabs Craig in the head with her stiletto heels, which temporarily stuns him. Then she helps George escape the screaming killer, and they run away together, through dark corridors, far away from Craig, and arrive at what seems to be some kind of secret laboratory. On a shelf, they can see what appears to be glass jars containing dead, deformed babies. In a chair they find Mandy, whom George declares to be dead. Kate screams out with despair, saying that it's her fault. If she hadn't payed Jimmy to go with her, he would have stayed and protected his girlfriend. George, afraid that Kate's screams might attract Craig, tells her to be quiet. He says that he's got a daughter, and that he really wants to see her again. They make a hole in a wall of bricks just as Craig appears. While fleeing they hear a scream, and it transpires that Mandy is in fact alive, but Craig, the "creep", is now performing a Cesarean on her with a very large, rusty, serrated blade. They arrive at an abandoned ticket office, which seems to have been transformed into his own personal sleeping quarters. There, they find Ray in a birdcage, and a photograph, showing what appears to be a much younger Craig, standing next to a professor. They are surprised by the adult Craig, who sneaks up on George from behind and bites him. George throws him on the floor and starts punching him. This actually makes Craig speak; he repeats the words that Mandy said just before he killed her as she begged for mercy. Then he gets furious, grabs George's head and impales it on a blade sticking out of the wall. Kate runs in panic, with Craig following. He catches her, but he almost doesn't seem to be interested in killing her anymore. Kate stabs his throat with a hook in the end of a chain. The other end she throws on the track, as a train is approaching. Craig rises from the ground and lifts up a barrel, which he intends to crush Kate's head with. Then the train goes by, dragging away the other end of the chain, leading to that the hook gets ripped out, making a huge wound in Craig's throat. Badly injured, he falls to the ground and dies. Kate actually appears to feel sorry for him. Afterwards she finds her way back to Charing Cross Station and Ray runs up on her knee. In the end of the film, a man waiting for a train puts a coin next to her, thinking she is a homeless beggar by the state of her clothes, and she bursts into tears in overwhelming relief because she has survived and is now safe.
[edit] Trivia
- The "bloody hand" posters were banned for a short time on the London Underground, but were later allowed.
- A game of Creep can be found at the official site (link below), in which posters for the movie can be seen through the windows of the train.
- The Underground scenes were filmed at the disused Jubilee Line platforms at Charing Cross as well at the disused Piccadilly Line station Aldwych.[2]
