Monster Movie of the Week: Creature (1998)

CREATURE (1998)

Director: Stuart Gillard

Genre: Horror/Survival/Sci-Fi

THE MOVIE

This 1998 television miniseries is perhaps better known as Peter Benchley’s Creature, itself based on Benchley’s novel White Shark and delivers some solid monster movie thrills for a TV movie. Benchley was best known as the author of Jaws and had made a career of aquatic thrillers and his later book borrows some elements of that story such as a seaside community setting with its own internal economics and politics, a shark expert tracking a man-eater and some other specific scenes and plot points.

However, the novel differs from the movie in several important ways. In the novel, the titular monster is a surgically enhanced shark man created by Nazi scientists. The movie takes this very campy premise and changes the monster to be a genetically engineered creature bred by the U.S. Navy that is a hybrid of shark, human and dolphin DNA which, while still ridiculous, is not quite as silly as a razor-toothed Nazi shark man. The movie also exchanges a Jaws-like New England setting for a south Caribbean locale. These changes make the movie better and less campy than it otherwise would have been and they make for a more interesting monster.

Also, interesting is a change in point of view for Benchley himself, who made a fortune off of the novel and movie version of Jaws, a piece of popular entertainment that framed a whole generation’s perceptions of sharks. I have a “Shark Week”-loving friend who hates Jaws with a passion because he feels it misrepresents sharks. Benchley is said to have regretted the success of his novel and its adaptation and later in his life became somewhat of a shark crusader. This point of view comes across in the protagonist of Creature. Simon Chase, who throughout the movie goes to great lengths to protect a pregnant Great White shark that has been mistakenly believed to be preying on the islanders.

Ultimately, “Creature” is surprisingly good for a TV movie, most of which are notoriously bad. It features a unique monster and some unsettling and genuinely scary moments. The movie has a somewhat Resident Evil kind of feel to it. I’m not talking about the movie but the game series, which has a rich cinematic heritage but manages to create a feel of its own that often features eerie decaying laboratories, engineered human monstrosities, and convoluted stories of corporate experimentation. Creature has a lot of those elements going for it, so if you are a fan of the Resident Evil games, you may really like Creature. The Creature itself looks like something that you would see in a Resident Evil game (Incidentally, the original Resident Evil game came out in 1998 as well and both Creature and Resident Evil seem to bear a passing thematic resemblance to The X-Files, which was still very hot at the time.)

THE MONTER/EFFECTS

While the effects in Creature leave something to be desired the monster itself is pretty cool. It is very shark like at first but it is also mammalian and has the ability to breathe air and walk around which is cool and unexpected (although I couldn’t help think of the “Land Shark” sketches that they had on Saturday Night Live in the '70's, ). When we finally get a good look at the monster we see that he is a perhaps 8 foot tall hunchbacked creature with a head that combines features of a man and a shark with long arms that end in vicious claws. Good stuff.

HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY

Recently released on DVD and available on Netflix.

MOST MEMORABLE SEQUENCE

While exploring a spooky, long abandoned and partially submerged navy research station, our heroes encounter the creature that chases them through the water and plops down on dry land where he undergoes a painful transformation to an air breather.

SEQUELS

None. Although, the idea is introduced that the creature can breed with a female great white…

SEE ALSO

Jaws 1975 Deep Blue Sea 1997

Patrick Garone
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Monster Movie of the Week: Jaws 2 (1978)

JAWS 2 (1978)
Director: Jeannot Szwarc
Genre: Sharksploitation

THE MOVIE

Believe it or not, there was a time when it was not automatically assumed that a successful movie would have a string of sequels attached to it. Sure, by the 1970's there had been some successful movie series, like the James Bond movies, which themselves were based on the extensive novel and short story catalog of Ian Fleming . But with the success of the Planet of the Apes movies, producers became aware of the possibilities of creating original sequels to successful movies. The 70's saw sequels to many of the decades most iconic movies: The Godfather, part II, The Exorcist II: The Heretic, Damien: Omen II. Producers became okay with this Law of Diminishing Returns. If a movie like Rocky, for example, was a great film and a classic, it was ok for Rocky 2 to be merely a good movie, and Rocky 3 to be just okay, as long as they were profitable. So, it was only a matter of time before they sequelized the second biggest box-office hit of the decade: Steven Spielberg's Jaws.

Putting the elements together for the sequel was no easy task. Spielberg was busy with his own projects and uninterested and most of the actors from the first movie were playing hard to get. An interesting but discarded plan for the sequel was to make a prequel focusing on Robert Shaw's character, Quint, and the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. This could have been a really cool movie, as Quint was easily the most compelling character in Jaws, and his monologue about surviving the sinking, shark-infested ship was one of the highlights of the first movie. I'm sort of surprised that in a Hollywood that is now fixated on remakes and prequels of classic movies, that this movie is not somehow in development. This would be a great way to expand the Jaws series without doing an icky remake or another tired sequel.

Once the Indianapolis story was scrapped, the producers managed to lure back Roy Schieder for another outing on Amity Island, in the first of three sequels to the classic movie featuring the Brody family and their endless encounters with Great White Sharks. Jaws 2 is the best of these sequels and a decent movie in its own right, despite the absurdity of the premise of yet another shark terrorizing the town and the fact that Amity's political establishment is, yet again, unwilling to deal with the problem until its too late. This is a little unbelievable to me. The first movie's scenario-the vested economic interests of the town seek to deny or downplay the presence of the shark to avoid scarring away the vacationers-I could believe but while politicians may be slow to act, they are profoundly self-interested and rarely make the same mistake twice.

Jaws 2 also focuses more on the now-teenage son of Chief Brody and his friends, making this sequel feel a little bit like a slasher film at sea. Eventually the shark stalks this group of teens as they are stranded at sea on sailboats and the discredited and fired Brody comes to their rescue. Brody finds another improbable way to blow up a shark in the movie's finale. Jaws 2 also features probably the most famous movie tagline ever: "Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water..."



THE MONSTER/EFFECTS

Bruce returns! The shark is largely the same as the one from Jaws, with the exception of the fact that it gets burned halfway through the movie. As it attacks a small boat, a woman tries to fight it off by pouring gasoline on it, which would have been badass if she had had a lighter handy. Sadly, he plan went no further but the shark still got burned when the boat exploded (For Some Reason) and Bruce sports some mean-looking scars for the rest of the movie. 'Cause the only thing scarier than a shark, is an ugly shark.

There is also a chewed up Killer Whale that washes up on the beach, a victim of the shark. I'm not sure, but I think this might be a fun reference to the 1977 Jaws ripoff, Orca. I love a good movie diss. It's like Bruce and that whale are having a rapper war. Quint's boat from the first movie was also called the Orca. That dead whale works on so many levels.

MOST MEMORABLE MOMENT

Bruce takes down a helicopter! Okay, it is one of those floating helicopters so it is not as awesome as the scene from Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus but it is still kinda cool.




HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY

Available on DVD and now streaming on Netflix.

THE TRAILER

MONSTER MOVIE OF THE WEEK: DEEP BLUE SEA (1999)

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Bonus Monster Movie of the Week: Jaws (1975)

JAWS (1975)
Director: Steven Spielberg
Genre: Nautical Horror

THE MOVIE

While there were hit movies in the 70’s such as The Exorcist and The Godfather, 1975’s Jaws was a phenomenon unto itself and-for better or worse-helped to create the summer blockbuster mentality that rules Hollywood. However, unlike many of today’s blockbusters, which are produced via corporate committee and probably some sort of Hollywood supercomputer that calculates which star will appeal to what demographic to put in which vehicle that remakes or relaunches which franchise resulting in X amount of dollars at opening and X percent of drop off on the second weekend and X number of DVD units sold, Jaws comes from a relatively unsophisticated time in terms of movie marketing. Certainly, it was an adaptation of a best selling novel and there were certain expectations of it in terms of box office performance, but you don’t get the idea that was conceived from the ground up as an exercise in making revenue. The movie retains some of the characteristic 1970’s auteurism, and is heavy on character and suspense and light on special effects and frenetic editing. Compared to today’s popcorn movies, it is very slow moving and offers a typically cynical post-Watergate commentary on government and authority, although in this case said government is extremely local.

Jaws tells the story of a small Mid-Atlantic beach community plagued by a Great White shark and the town’s new police chief’s attempts to protect the people from the ocean predator. The problem is compounded by the fact that the town is economically dependent on the beaches and the powers that be are trying their best to downplay and deny the shark’s existence. Ultimately Sheriff Brody teams up with a grizzled fisherman and a young marine biologist to track down and kill the shark. There are lots of good and quirky performances such as Roy Scheider as an a hydrophobic New York cop who moved his family to a small island community to “make a difference.” Robert Shaw steals many scenes as Quinn, a veteran of the infamous U.S.S. Indianapolis, which sank in shark infested waters during the Second World War.



A very young Richard Dreyfuss plays Matt Hooper, a wealthy shark expert who uses a lot of (at the time) high tech equipment. The last quarter of the movie is the three of these characters at sea attempting to track and kill the shark. There is a lot of tension built into the story between Quinn and Hooper, with Quinn relying on almost 19th Century technology and Hooper representing a newer, 20th Century way of exploring the sea.

If the movie were made today, it would be George Clooney, Keanu Reeves and Ryan Reynolds.

Jaws also launched the career of a young Steven Spielberg who had prior to this movie only made Sugarland Express and the TV movie Duel about a motorist plagued by a monstrous semi truck on an abandoned stretch of highway which actually shares some thematic similarity with Jaws. After Jaws, Spielberg went on to such classics as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T. He has gone on to win an Academy Award for his work on Schindler’s List and is one of America’s most respected motion picture directors as well as one of the most popular.

On a personal note, although Jaws was released a few months prior to my birth, it was a movie that I grew up with thanks to being part of the first home video generation. As odd as it may seem, there was time not too long ago when there were no DVDs or even video cassettes and if you wanted to see a movie you had to either go see it in the theater or catch it on a TV broadcast. In the early 1980’s this all changed drastically with the affordability of VCRs and the ability to rent movies or tape them off TV or later premium cable channels (until the mid 1990’s it was still prohibitively expensive for most people to buy a video of a movie as most “official” videos of movies cost anywhere from $75-$125 a pop. They eventually started releasing selected hit movies on VHS at an affordable price and when DVD became the standard now all movies are released at an “ownable” price point). Jaws was a movie that was on heavy rotation in my household when I was growing up and consequently I pretty much know it by heart (along with Rocky, Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, and The Godfather) so it was weird and bittersweet for me to pop in a DVD of this movie and watch it after not having seen it for fifteen years or so.

THE MONSTER/EFFECTS

Another hallmark of when this movie was made and another reason that it earns my respek is that the monster is basically a realistically proportioned shark. It is estimated by one of the characters to be about 25 feet long, which is large but not impossible. If they were to make this movie today, the shark would be at least 100 feet long and probably some kind of mutant. As a matter of fact, there has been a movie in development hell since the 1990’s by the name of Meg based on a novel-or rather a screenplay disguised as a novel-that would be a de facto Jaws update. Meg features a giant prehistoric shark that literally eats a tyrannosaur in one bite in the novel’s prologue. This gives you a pretty good idea what a contemporary Jaws would be: lots of showy effects and a creature bigger and more spectacular than anything we’ve seen before: The American Godzilla syndrome in full force.

Who are you calling a son of a bitch?

Spielberg’s movie on the other hand barely shows you the shark until the end but it’s presence is felt through out the whole movie, whether it is seen or not. I won’t pretend this is due solely to artistic reasons or an attempt to be Hitchcockian. After all, Steven Spielberg has given us plenty of visual excess in his long career. Anyone who knows anything about this troubled production knows that the animatronic shark didn’t work half the time and the filmmakers had to work and edit around it. Spielberg repeatedly refers to it in the DVD extras as “The Great White Turd.” But the movie is better and more suspenseful for it.

DVD AVAILABILITY

Widely available as a 2 disc 25th anniversary edition originally released in 2000.

Sadly, not yet on Blu-Ray.

MOST MEMORABLE SEQUENCE

It’s funny. What I remember most about the movie are the little mundane details that have absolutely nothing to do with the shark. Spielberg’s early movies have this great ability to capture detail of life in the 70’s and 80’s, especially regarding child life. I love the little scene in this movie where Brody and his younger son are mimicking one another’s faces. It is a short little scene with no dialogue but it is so evocative of a small boy’s world. Spielberg was a master of capturing these kinds of little moments and details.

I also love Roy Scheider getting slapped by the woman in the veil.

And the girl who yells, "Sh-shark!"

Also, this movie features one of my favorite clichés in which the Hero Studies a Well Illustrated Book about the monster he will later face.

SEQUELS

There are three sequels to Jaws each one more improbable and of worse quality than the last one. Although, Jaws 2 was pretty good.

ORIGINAL TRAILER


SEE ALSO
Orca 1981