Movie Review: Creep 2

Creep 2 *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Patrick Brice.

Written by: Patrick Brice & Mark Duplass.

Starring: Mark Duplass (Aaron), Desiree Akhavan (Sara), Karan Soni (Dave).

 

The original Creep – which played the festival circuit in 2014, and had a modest release in 2015 – was an effective, mirco-budgeted found footage horror comedy, in which Mark Duplass effective skewered his own image as the nice hipster, by essentially playing that character again, but this time, using it to mask the fact that he’s a serial killer. That film found Duplass’ Josef placing an ad in Craigslist looking for a videographer to come to his secluded house in the woods, and shoot footage of him for one day, at the rate of $1,000. The videographer gets there, and is creeped out by Josef – but then again, Josef tells him he’s dying of cancer, and he wants to make this video for his unborn child, so he goes along with what is asked of him. Besides, it just seems like Josef is just a weird hipster – nothing all that dangerous. Of course, that’s not all Josef is.

 

In many ways, Creep 2 follows the same basic premise of the original – and yet is smart enough to know that even if his ruse would work on another videographer, it wouldn’t work so well on the audience. So after a bloody opening scene – a kind of mini version of Creep played out in 7 minutes – when Josef, who now calls himself Aaron (which was the name of the victim in the original Creep) places the same ad for a videographer, and gets another response, he has a different game in mind this time. The videographer who replies is Sara (Desiree Akhavan) – a frustrated filmmaker, whose web series “Encounters” has gone nowhere – and when she shows up, Aaron lays the cards out on the table for her. He is a serial killer, he’s just turned 40, and he’s losing his love for his “vocation”. He wants Sara to film him for 24 hours, again for $1,000, and he promises he won’t kill her in that 24 hour period. She may actually get a good episode of Encounters out of it.

 

Creep 2 is very aware of what the original film did, and instead of repeating itself, works hard not to – it actually calls attention to the kind of jump scares and Boo moments that freaked Aaron out so much in the original film, and shows that Sara is hardly impressed. She’s a tougher nut to crack than the last guy – and she doesn’t really believe that this Aaron is a serial killer – just an aging, creepy hipster, with a bad ponytail, who decides to get naked pretty much right after meeting her – a way to “clear the sexual tension” that will always “exist between a man and a woman”. Sara doesn’t want to be intimidated, and responses in kind.

 

All this is an effective way to make a horror sequel – acknowledge what worked about the last film, but then try to push beyond that into something else. While it’s only been a few years, what works best here maybe the fact that Duplass’ character is aging – and he realizes it. At what point does an aging hipster – who makes complicated smoothies, and listens to unknown jam bands from the 1990s – who do with “one guitar solo what no poet in history has been able to do” start to go from just weird, to out and out creepy and pathetic.

 

The ending of the film is effective in its own way – there is a kind of shaky cam horror movie in the woods climax that borrows too heavily from the Blair Witch Project, but hey, it’s still effective. But it’s really the last shot in the movie that is a quiet stunner – and makes me excited about the already announced Creep 3.