Josh Keown | Night Terror Novels 🧛🏻♂️’s review published on Letterboxd:
“Nothing. And Everything. He makes everything possible. Your worst fears and nightmares. He's Halloween made flesh.”
- Cola on Spring-heeled Jack (Becca Beton)
Available to Amazon Prime (UK) members here.
Okay, so like I do with any anthology films, I’ll review each segment individually, but there is something I need to say about the sound in Creature Feature before all that.
So, yeah. The sound. The sound is easily the absolute worst part of the film, it is just horrible. I had to turn the volume up to hear what anyone was saying, only to have my eardrums burst by the obnoxious 'scary' noises. Oh yeah, just in case you can't tell what's happening on screen, the film helps the audience identify the 'horror' scenes by playing generic and extremely grating 'scary' music. Every single panel cut in the film is marred by an equally annoying, loud and repetitive 'musical' accompaniment. It is literally painful. Right, now that's out of the way...
The wraparound segment
This includes a prologue that adapts a two line horror short story, and a group of terrible, vapid characters telling the stories found herein at a Halloween party. It is really dull and culminates in an unsatisfactory ending.
VERDICT; 1/5 or 2/10
1. How do you feel about clowns? segment
So this first story is literally just a sub-par retelling of the age old statue urban legend. You know, the one that has been done to death, especially in short films. Babysitter babysitting, finds creepy statue, calls parents, “We have no statue!”, slash slash, stab stab, fin. This is a crap adaptation of it, though. You're better off watching Christmas Presence (2015). Or Red Balloon (2010). Or- you get the point.
VERDICT; 1/5 or 2/10
2. Revenge... with a twist segment
Formulaic revenge story, despite its purported 'twist'. A dude comes back as a zombie to take revenge on those that murdered him, visiting his widowed lady at the same time. That's all there is to it. Most of it consists of couples making out or shagging, and this doesn't get any better in subsequent entries.
VERDICT; 1/5 or 2/10
3. The three witches segment
A woman is sacrificed by a coven of witches. Spring-heeled Jack features, which is nice as he is one of the few paranormal ghoulies not flogged to death by cinema, but this story suffers all the same pitfalls as the previous ones. Namely awful acting, crap cinematography and woeful writing. This one is also far too short to ever take off.
VERDICT; 1/5 or 2/10
4. Scarecrows segment
The scarecrow story plays out like a generic slasher; sex and violence and little else. The music is particularly obnoxious in this tale. The scarecrow slasher in question wearing sneakers was stupidly hilarious, though.
VERDICT; 1/5 or 2/10
5. Dreadful Jack segment
A man who could probably win a Ray Liotta lookalike contest prepares to sacrifice/torture a woman. This is it. The apex of Creature Feature's terrible sound design. All you can hear is her whimpering, so loud it drowns out anything Ray Liottalike is saying. Luckily I had already given up caring about 50 minutes prior.
VERDICT; 1/5 or 2/10
6. One more for the road segment
The last, and probably best (though only marginally) story in this sorry excuse of a horror anthology. This one, about a supposedly haunted house with a secret, is again a poorly acted and rubbishly made affair, but it at least features some funky practical effects.
VERDICT; 1/5 or 2/10
VERDICT; To put it as simple as possible, there are far, far better anthology horror films out there. Beside some relatively nice interlinking of the stories, Creature Feature is just poor and unoriginal in every department.
1/5 or 2/10