One of the more surprising franchises in LRF history has to be The Creature series - a series of 6 mostly loosely connected creature features. For this latest edition of A Second Look, I will take a look at the film that started it all in Season 4, The Creature.
The film was helmed by Robert Eggers, known for his creepy and atmospheric work. That skill is put to good use in this fantasy film, even if it is a lot more convoluted than I remembered. The film is led by the trio of Garrett Hedlund, Emmy Rossum and Amanda Seyfried. Hedlund and Seyfried's performances stand out nicely, but upon this second look Rossum feels a bit miscast. I thought I remembered a lot more mermaid action than the film actually features, but I my memory must be mixing in aspects of the prequel's plot. In fact, this film has very little in the way of action until the climax of the film.
After viewing The Creature again, admittedly for the first time since around the time of the prequel's release, it is honestly surprising that this film led to a franchise. It's not a bad film by any means, but it really doesn't do much in the way of world-building. The Creature is a mostly-contained fantasy drama more along the lines of something like Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water rather than what one would perceive as a franchise film. For a film on the shorter side, The Creature moves pretty slowly and definitely could have done more with its concept than it ended up doing. In the end it was good, just not as good as I recalled.
Original Grade: B
New Grade: B-
The Creature Link: https://sites.google.com/site/lrfimdb/the-creature
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