The Creeps: Movie Review

Zach, an American, movie buff and wanker, travels to Finland with the dream of celebrating his 17th birthday in style with his colleague Joe. His plan: a weekend of partying at Monster Fest, the legendary festival in the Vuokatti ski resort, famous for its hot chicks, liters of alcohol, rock concerts, steamy saunas and a luxury guest as the icing on the cake, actor Christopher Lambert, the teenager’s idol. Nothing could go wrong. Or so I thought. He didn’t expect that a crazy person would unleash chaos by opening a dimensional portal with a bizarre machine, releasing an army of little snow demons… the Creeps.

The synopsis is enough to capture the unmistakable aroma of nostalgia, implicit and explicit, that permeates the new proposal by Finnish Marko Mäkilaakso, almost a decade after his no less eighties “It Came from the Desert” (2017). And it’s just the tip of the iceberg. “The Creeps” is Mäkilaakso’s tribute to the genre cinema that saw him grow up, a party camouflaged in another party. And at this point, given the capacity, I would almost say it was a private party.

That fashions return every twenty years is not the result of chance or destiny, but of a commercial maneuver: capitalizing on the nostalgia of those who were teenagers and today, turned into adults with purchasing power, need to claim their past as a refuge from a present that suffocates them. It is not necessary to bring up the saturation of eighties nocilladas that we ate at the beginning of the two thousandths. The phenomenon is well understood. And therefore, it is possible to understand both the purpose of “The Creeps” and its nonsense. We are faced with a B-series Creature Feature that arrives two cycles late to the nostalgia it aims to scratch. The “goonie” generation, proud of having grown up among Phoskitos, VHS and latex dolls, has ended up exchanging resistance for resilience, learning to survive in an audiovisual ecosystem that no longer belongs to them. A less traumatic transition thanks to an overwhelming catalog of modern jewels, of incontestable quality and interest, such as “Weapons”, “Sinners”, “Smile”, “Háblame”, “Longless” or “The substance”, among other new references. Meanwhile, the aroma of eighties nostalgia continues to ferment, with traces of rancidity and a corpse aftertaste. If anything, the one that works is the one that works: the one from the nineties, revived in new installments of “Scream”, “I Know What You Did Last Summer”, “Scary Movie” (sigh) and other pop relics for the generation that is beginning to look back. At this point, the question is inevitable: What target audience is “The Creeps” aimed at? Yes, titles like “Frankie Freako”, which circulated at festivals last year, were already anachronistic. To this tonal gap we must add that of its agenda, with a premiere scheduled for Christmas 2021.

Let everyone take the above as a warning or incentive; We are not here to undermine illusions, nor to manufacture them. “The Creeps” moves easily through the terrain of the teenage horror comedy, flirting at times with sex and gore, but never straying from the family film mold that established its main reference: “Gremlins” (1984). Such is the weight of Joe Dante’s classic, that the filmmaker himself blesses the proposal with a small supporting role. There is no shortage of meta elbows to other legends of the eighties, such as “Infernal Possession”, “Back to the Future”, “Critters”, “The Fantastic Car” – the KITT thing transcends mere homage – and, most especially, “The Immortals”, with Christopher Lambert revisiting Connor MacLeod in an outdated sword duel with the Kurgan (?). And when they are not winks, they are cliches and cuddly textbook tropes: handsome bullies with pretensions, a badass escaped from a geek convention, nerds salivating over the hottie who plays along with them, foul-mouthed bugs doing comb-overs, prop police, Soviet conspiracies, etc. The losers get wet, the bad guys get dirty, boy looks for girl, girl finds boy, save the world and all that. His speeches are as naive as his sense of humor, filled with breaking the fourth wall with Zach’s monologues on camera, embarrassing music videos and gags that, if they don’t hit the viewer right away, end up ulcerating.

“The Creeps” is an ideal film for those who maintain their diet of nostalgic reflux and like to point their fingers at the screen, wherever they are. Bland, self-righteous irreverence, parody, pastiche, complacency, self-awareness, a lot of bullshit. They are his cards, he neither hides them nor disguises them. Of course, don’t expect anything on par with the films it honors.

Jedediah.