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)
