Creeping Death

Matt Sampere had an idea years ago of a story he wanted to tell.

Matt wrote, directed and starred in Creeping Death, a movie that doesn't overcomplicate things and just tells a tale based in my favourite season of the year Halloween.

The movie caught the essence of autumn perfectly from the opening scenes.

It had it all with gore and great storytelling.

Yes characters came across unlikeable (like so many big budget Hollywood movies) so I found myself rooting for the monster which I thought looked very cool!

It also had great emotional scenes with his mother which pulled at the heart strings.

Trying to take care of his mother, a teen finds his friends have disrupted his Halloween plans by stealing a sack of sacrificial offerings for a Celtic deity known as Aos Si which has now turned its attention to them and forces him to help stop the creature from taking them all out.

This was a generally decent if somewhat underwhelming effort at times. One of the better features here is the solid sense of atmosphere and lore attempted here incorporating the Celtic deity into the mix during the holiday season. The main idea of the deity effectively being an early purveyor of Halloween lore by offering the kind of setup that shows itself as an early setup for trick-or-treating in how people would leave sacrificial gifts for it in exchange for their safety and is a practice honored by the town that they're too self-centered to honor. With the way it works here involving the being as a figure that they anger and have it be targeting them for the remainder of the first, this setup brings about a lot of rather fun traditional revenge motifs which are woven together quite nicely bringing in the folklore of the spirit's origins to change things up. That also allows the film to ramp up the holiday aesthetic here with the usual assortment of decor and ornamentation found during the holiday, as the whole thing is littered with trick-or-treaters, lighted pumpkins, and everyone going around in their costumes before being attacked by the creature in some gruesome and graphic attacks. The look of the spirit is decent enough, but its inhuman appearance and powers make the encounters solid enough, including the necking couple outside the friend's house, the race to get away when it appears outside the group or the attack at the house where it generates some fun stalking scenes along with several great kills. There are some big issues to be had with this one. One of the main issues with the film is the sense of over-familiarity that runs wild throughout here as everything comes across as any number of similar genre efforts. Featuring an assortment of unlikable teens getting in over their heads by disrupting something and getting a supernatural act of vengeance to stalk them for their misdeeds is not as original a premise as it should be with everything here running through the same patterns a storyline like this usually dictates. By staying in such familiar realms, it doesn't do much of anything new and remains familiar and predictable as a result of the assortment of teens he's stalking the usual unlikable selection of figures in this type of film doesn't help this one much. The other big drawback with the film is the lack of explanation for why the main teen who knows about the creature and what's going on has to go through with helping the other group get away from the creature. The blackmail used to get him onto their side being friends in the past and how to help them get away with the desecration of the sacrificial offering makes no sense and putting himself in danger to help them figure out what's going on isn't well throughout. The last factor with this one is an uneven first half where there's way too much emphasis on the cancer diagnosis to give the film enough time to get much else explored or explained before getting to more traditional matters in the second half. These all manage to bring this one down overall.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language, and Brief Nudity.

No pun intended - actually I am not sure if you can say that it is steady. It is really tough to rate and review something that one has put so much heart and soul into. But as the director said, before we watched his movie on one of the biggest screens in the world, he edited this on a laptop. I don't think he could imagine the scope ... and what it does watching this on a big screen - I don't think he was aware of lighting issues or other issues (editing wise) that would arise.

But even without those you really have to suspend your disbelief ... you have to just take the flaws this throws at you (including some very bad acting and plot holes that might have been bigger than the screen we watched this on) ... if you can, maybe you'll be able to enjoy this more. But you live and learn and maybe the next effort of this filmmaker will be better.

As I happened to stumble upon the 2023 horror movie "Creeping Death" by chance here in 2024, I opted to watch it since it was a horror movie that I had not seen before, much less actually heard about. And thus, I suppose that writer and director Matt Sampere has every opportunity to entertain and scare me with this movie.

The storyline was pretty straightforward, and while it certainly was a watchable horror movie, you're not in for a grand horror experience from writer and director Matt Sampere. The movie was, at best, a generic horror experience. Sure, I found the storyline to be adequate, but it was by no means a movie that brought anything new to the horror genre.

While I was actually not familiar with the cast ensemble in the movie, I will say that the acting performances were actually fair. They had a good ensemble of actors and actresses to portray the various characters in the movie.

Visually then the movie was okay. It was not a movie that made use of an abundance of special effects. But whatever effects were in the movie were actually fair enough and served their purpose.

If you enjoy horror movies, by all means give "Creeping Death" a chance. You might just happen to enjoy the movie a lot more than I did. There are far worse horror movies out there, so why not give this movie a fair chance?

My rating of "Creeping Death" lands on a five out of ten stars.

Low budget. Unskilled actors. Weak story but still, in some strange way, somewhat watchable.

This is obviously a passion project for those involved but it fails to deliver for the mainstream. The characters are stereotypical, uninspired and uninteresting.

The special effects just aren't special. There's an attempt to create gore and although it's obviously low budget, some of it was interesting to watch. The kill aspect is what kept me watching. I wanted to see what they were going to attempt next. As a horror fan, that's what makes the film for me.

It's not an amazing film but it is someone's interesting new Halloween lore movie and if you're into checking out those new ideas, it's worth a watch.