The Creature from Cannibal Creek

A short while back, a friend of mine turned me on to an indie film in which he appeared, the film, Creature from Cannibal Creek  (currently appearing on Tubitv) is a rather enjoyable (if campy) horror film that is about a group of cold-blooded, murderous cannibals who have made a practice of waylaying hikers in their woods, keeping them in cages and forcing them to do chores until more food is needed, and then butchering and eating them. Unfortunately for the cannibals, things go awry when one of their captives escapes but winds up dying in the surrounding forest from a knife wound to his stomach that he sustained during his escape. Everything changes, when, inexplicably, nature somehow takes a hand, reviving the former captive — and now corpse — metamorphing him — in true comicbook form (think Man-Thing, Swamp Thing, The Heap — into a marauding vegetative creature out for revenge.

As stated, the film itself, while not terrifying on an Exorcist level, is “technically” a horror film and, as it turns out, is still quite enjoyable as well as all sorts of goofy fun. The film starts out with on-screen text stating that many people over the years have disappeared in the woods and suggesting what we are about to see is possibly what happened to some of the missing. Next, we meet a couple of hikers who come to a very grizzly end at the hands of Eddie (Simon Wheeldon). Next up we meet both Harriet (Deborah Jayne Reilly Smith), and Neptune (Jim Ordolis) — the two other members of the cannibal clan.

Near as we can determine, Harriet is the matriarch of the clan, while Eddie (who communicates only in grunts and wears a full face mask) and Neptune (who does speak and wears no mask) are her errand boys. Neptune discovers David (John Migliore) wandering in the woods (pining over photos of her and him as well as a news clipping of the woman from the photos who is missing). David has found a piece of her backpack in the woods. Neptune radios back to Harriet, who sends a katana-wielding Eddie to help abduct him. Once David is captured, they bring him back to their compound where he is locked in a cage with other prisoners. It is there that he discovers that the woman was apparently also captive a week or so back, but is now simply gone, and the other prisoners can’t tell him where she is now.

Some time later Eddie comes by to get David to do some chores, and unlocks David’s cage, only to be jumped by David who tries to fight his way out. Unfortunately, Eddie knifes him. Presuming David is dead, Eddie runs off to fetch Harriet. Only David isn’t quite dead and crawls off into the woods.  Eddie returns with Harriet who sends Eddie off to follow the trail of David’s blood to find him. It is in the depts of the mystical wood that David eventually succumbs, only to merge with the foliage of the wood and resurrect as the eponymous “Creature of Cannibal Creek”. Once he is arisen, the creature wanders off into the wood.

Shortly after this a middle-age couple picks up a younger (tattooed woman with facial piercings) hitchhiking. Only the couple’s car runs out of gas, forcing the hitchhiker to walk to the next town to look for gas. The husband sends his wife to walk with her but the older woman (and then then her husband) are both killed and dragged off by the creature, while the hitchhiker simply walks off. Neptune finds the body of the man the Creature killed and begins to drag it back to Harriet.

We then meet a couple (man and woman) more captives, one of whom somehow seems to have a key to the chains holding them, which the woman uses to escape, only to be caught and killed by the creature. Eddie finds her body and drags her back to the compound. Meanwhile the body count continues when the creature kills not only a hiker in the woods, but Neptune as well. The body count ramps up as the Creature finally confronts both Harriet and Eddie. They manage to corral him in a fenced in area and start sending in their captives for the creature to kill, only he refuses to kill a woman who was nice to him while he was still Dave. Eventually, there is a final confrontation between the Creature and the cannibals which brings us to the end of the film.

Once again, the film is neither intended to be a slasher/hacker, splatterpunk blood bath nor the suspenseful/psychological, descent into madness horror film, but rather a fun, indie muck monster film, with a fair number of random deaths, and just enough bloodletting to qualify it as (somewhat) gory. Needless to say, it succeeds on those levels. So, if you just love monsters, indie films, and consider both to be a good time, you’ll want to check out the Creature from Cannibal Creek; available for purchase, or to stream online (Tubi, Prime Video)