Movie review: The Creep Behind The Camera (2014)
The Creep Behind The Camera (2014), a docudrama about the man behind The Creeping Terror (1964), is a tough one to evaluate because my emotional response was shifting wildly from scene to scene. It’s competently made. The cinematography is quite good. There are some gorgeous visual moments. The performances are excellent. But I found the whole thing extremely difficult to watch because of the subject matter and the way the film chooses to unfold its story.
Vic Savage (despite his many aliases, this is the name I’ll use) was a lot of things. What he is most famous for is the 1964 monster movie The Creeping Terror which he directed and starred in. This movie has since become a cult film and was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000, a TV show dedicated to spotlighting the very worst movies ever made. It’s a film so incompetent made that a narrator will spend several minutes talking over sequences of characters talking silently and relaying what they are saying rather than just letting the audience hear the dialog itself.
I have attempted to watch The Creeping Terror without the MST3K commentary and it is extremely rough. The print is terrible. There are many long sequences of nothing happening. The camera lingers on the legs of the women being eaten by the monster in a way that suggests someone involved had some kind of an unusual kink. The monster is a walking carpet with a hole cut in it to act as a mouth. The behind-the-scenes decision making must have been wild and ludicrous.
Now here’s where I had trouble actually keeping up with the docudrama. It never seems sure of what tone it wants to take. Is this docudrama showing us the more silly aspects of movie-making? It certainly is at times. Take the scene of the monster costume inventor stealing his creation the night before filming was to begin because he was tired of Vic Savage never getting around to paying him.
But the movie will jump from a silly moment into some very disturbing areas. If this dramatization is accurate (and it’s based on and includes interviews with people who knew him, who did business with him, and who married him) Vic Savage was a seriously sick individual. He literally tortures his wife with a gas stove. He abused her both physically and mentally. There’s an attempted rape scene. His wife make a suicide attempt (it isn’t something merely alluded to, it’s on camera). I was expecting something quite a bit lighter.
The movie can’t seem to decide if it’s showing a guy too incompetent to make a cheap monster movie or whether he’s a dangerous psychopath who’s possibly a child molester. Ultimately he was both, but the huge shifts in tone made this difficult for me to sit through (I ended up taking a break and finishing the movie the following day).
Now, again, I want to emphasize how well produced this movie is. The performances by the actors portraying the real people are excellent. Josh Phillips as Vic Savage is utterly terrifying.
As I said, it took me two days to actually get through the movie. It’s obviously made by very skilled and talented people; it’s just not something I was expecting or something I ever wish to revisit.
