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Creeping FleshRating:
Release Date: 08 June, 2004 Retail Price: $24.96 OUR Price: $21.99 You SAVE: $2.97! Cast: Complete Cast (8 total) |
Creeping Flesh Reviews
Hard To Follow At Times
I agree with another reviewer that they could have explored the main theme of this movie more which is this ancient skeleton that is the embodiment of evil I guess.
Cushing believes that evil is a disease so he takes a blood sample from the skeleton to create a vaccine that he thinks will cure people from being evil.
I guess he feels there's something wrong with his daughter so he injects her with his new formula. But perhaps the only thing wrong with her was he kept her locked up in the house for her entire adult life.
That's when things get sad.
Somehow she inexplicably becomes possessed with the spirit of her dead mother who went insane.
She goes to a brothel and gets taken advantage of and finally slashes this guy's throat with a broken bottle.
Maybe I just took the whole thing too seriously.
Another reviewer also mentioned the strange painting that Cushing is working on at the beginning of the movie. I guess the painting sort of encapsulates the entire movie.
One good thing is apparently back then most of the women in London had gigantic breasts and they kept falling out of their dresses in the pubs.
I would recommend this movie to horror fans because it's got horror legends Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.
Jeff Marzano
Recommended further viewing:
Brides Of Blood / Beast Of Blood
Horror Hotel
IT ! (The Terror From Beyond Space)
Invasion Of The Saucer Men
Not Of This Earth (original)
Phantasm
The Blob (with Steve McQueen)
The Brain That Wouldn't Die
The Flesh Eaters
The Fly / The Return Of The Fly / The Curse Of The Fly
The Four Skulls Of Jonathan Drake
The Hideous Sun Demon
The Hypnotic Eye
The Incredible Shrinking Man
The Indestructible Man
The Manster
The Thing (from another world)
The Thing That Couldn't Die
The Twilight Zone Collections
One of Britain's Most Offbeat Horror Films
Freddie Francis' "The Creeping Flesh" is one of the oddest, most eccentric British horror films of the 1970s. I can't claim that it's one of Francis' best directed films, but it has a sincerity often lacking in horror films of the period, and it also has an excellent performance by Peter Cushing. It's definitely worth a look, and worth adding to your collection if you're a diehard fan of the great, underrated Peter Cushing.
Cushing portrays a Victorian-era gentleman paleontologist. In other words, he uses his family's own money to support his various world explorations and site digs. He's something of a dabbler, and the film quickly establishes that he's regarded by most as an eccentric lightweight and not a true scientist. As the film opens, Cushing's enthusiasm over his latest finding - an enormous humanoid skeleton - is quickly tempered by blunt reminders of his family's finances via his spinster daughter (who still lives with him), and his psychiatrist half-brother (ably played by Christopher Lee). Cushing's understanding of evolution is quite different from Charles Darwin's, and he comes to believe that the giant-sized fossil in his laboratory is actually the skeleton of an ancient evil.
"The Creeping Flesh" combines several different genre elements. The story is probably inspired by the real-life Cardiff Giant hoax in the US, or the Piltdown Man hoax in Britain, but Francis and the screenwriters take it far beyond that. At times, it's a tragedy of Victorian sexual repression when we learn some of Cushing's backstory and witness his daughter's actions when she is infected by serum extracted from the fossil. At other times, there are Lovecraftian references. At yet others, we have a good-old-fashioned tale of inmate abuse at Christopher Lee's asylum. There's even a little bit of typical creature-feature shenanigans towards the end. Thankfully, there's no tasteless gore or tedious tongue-in-cheek comedy.
The DVD transfer looks and sounds excellent, especially compared to the VHS version. There are minimal extras (mainly consisting of trailers for other films, subtitles, and a Japanese language track of all things). As I alluded to earlier, "The Creeping Flesh" also has a lot of negatives that keep me from rating it higher. The plot elements are as clumsily stitched together as the Frankenstein Monster, and despite Francis' brilliance as a director he can't overcome many of the period anachronisms inherent in the film. Hairstyles and topical references are often woefully inappropriate for a film supposedly taking place in the 1890s, for example. Furthermore, it's painfully obvious that no one even pretended to consult with a scientist regarding the accuracies of the script - the more you know about human biology, the more ridiculous the laboratory scenes are. Even Cushing's excellent delivery can't help distract me from such gaffes as the claim that Neanderthals had smaller cranial capacities than modern man (they actually had larger capacities, particularly relating to visual acuity).
If you already love Cushing or Francis, you'll want this one. Christopher Lee fans who'd like to see what the youthful Lee was like when he wasn't playing Dracula will also want to take a peek. Although the movie is flawed, it definitely has its charms if you're in the right frame of mind.
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