Creature Features Collection 2003 Elite Entertainment   Buy It Now

In 1920, the film which is considered to be the first horror film hit the screens. Director Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari would pave the way for future generations of horror films. The concept of the horror film is something that has been remade, recreated, reinvasion, and recycled many, many times over. It has been broken down into sub-genres and with so many different styles and so many countries making horror films of their own, documentary filmmakers have done a number of different films to further examine the long standing genre.

Creature Features is a three-part, French produced documentary that examines three very distinct genres in the world of horror. The Beasts, The Machines and The Dead; these episode titles alone should be more than enough to clue you in on exactly what the series is dealing with. Creature Features however takes its presentation and examination beyond the scope of just the horror film and connects into science fiction as well, and it is undeniable that these two genres are virtually inseparable in many ways and there has always been some connection. The areas that the documentary series aims to cover, while not necessarily innovative, aren’t necessarily ones that should be overlooked and actually tend to be some of the bigger parts of horror. However, what the real problem is with the series is the manner in which they are executed.

Each of the three episodes runs around 45 minutes or so, and what you’d expect to find, just like most documentaries, are clips from movies, maybe a few images and still from books or magazines, interviews, and a good deal of historic information to pull it all together. For or less, each of the Creature Features segments are merely just clips from horror films, and lengthy ones at that. That doesn’t sound so bad, unless you consider the almost complete lack of voice over work that is found, and what is included isn’t informative so much as it aims more towards just spouting off a bit of information about the movies or stating, “as you’ll see here in (insert movie name.”) The long clips make the segments drag on for far too long, giving Creature Features the feeling of being more like six hours in length rather than the running time of just over two hours.

Are there interviews of any sort? Absolutely not; there’s no one to talk about what it was like to work on a certain movie or write the script or even direct it, no historians to talk about eh significance of a particular film, how one of them might have been a box office disaster or a cutting edge piece of cinema that laid the ground work for those that followed it. Instead, you simply have shallow, lifeless script that helps to lull you into a trance if nothing else.

I also have to disagree with some of the selections of movie in the various segments. The Beasts for instance does include some clips that work perfectly. The Birds, Jaws, An American Werewolf in London, these are all perfect examples of beasts in movies. You have either monsters run amuck on the human race or the beasts within us all killing without mercy. But, then there’s the usage of The Elephant Man. While it’s true that Joseph Merrick was seen as a “monster” because of his disfigurement, I would hardly lump a man with a medical condition into the same category as beasts, nor would I use footage from movie focusing on freak shows, which is exactly what the documentary does. It also tries to illustrate movies that preyed upon man’s fear of beasts, such as Them and other giant insect movie of the 1950’s which really weren’t trying to play on the fear of the creature themselves so much as make statements about nuclear weapons. Even Planet of the Apes is mentioned in relation to beasts, and the filmmakers apparently have forgotten that in reality, the film is yet another cautionary tale about the use of nuclear weapons and the “beasts” are simply apes who have evolved since mankind has nearly annihilated himself and reverted back to a more primitive state.

The other portions of the three part series, The Machines and The Dead, don’t fare much better either and contain the same, drab lack of information regarding their subject matter. The rest of the presentation is the same as well; nothing more than a clip show. The DVD sports no bonus features either, giving it even more of a lack luster presentation.

Creature Features would be the type of documentary style series that I might recommend to someone who has never seen a horror film in their life, but only as a means to give examples of what they possibly could watch and not to learn anything from. This feels more like it was simply someone trying to compile together their favorite clips from various movies, not an examination of the different genres, what they potentially give viewers, or even the evolution over the years. The Creature Features Collections is something that if you are a devoted horror aficionado, should be passed over as the amount of information you’ll gleam while watching it will be more along the lines of recalling that you haven’t seen a particular horror film in quite a while, but that’s truly about the extent of it.
 

-mike-