Month: February 2026

Creep (2014)

Mark Duplass is a funny guy.

You may know him as Brendan Deslaurier, the mega-sensitive male midwife from The Mindy Project, or as Pete Eckhart, a member of The League, a raunchy dude sit-com that ran for six years on FX network.

Creep is also funny, but in a really uncomfortable way. It’s a found-footage duet with director Patrick Brice, in which Duplass is Josef, a terminally ill man spending a day with hired videographer Aaron (Brice), on hand to document Josef’s farewell statements to his unborn son, Buddy.

From the moment Aaron accepts the job, driving way out hell and gone to a remote cabin in the woods, things just get gradually weirder and darker, his unease growing like a pea plant.

Josef turns out to be a human hurricane of passive/aggressive tactics, finding every opportunity to frighten Aaron, and then quickly apologize for his increasingly bizarre behavior.

Push and pull back. Push and pull back. It becomes a dance between the two men, as Josef tells Aaron disturbing stories about his life and wife, as they wander through the woods, eat pancakes at a diner, and return to Josef’s cabin.

Aaron, the consummate professional, is rattled by Josef’s manner that oscillates between pledges of warm friendship and frozen moments of cold confession that should be setting off screaming alarm bells in the head of someone with more common sense.

After having spent the day with Josef, he’s in a hurry to get home and work on the footage—or more likely to escape his merry menacing employer.

Sadly, like Chris Washington in Get Out, Aaron can’t find his car keys.

Josef is many things, chief among them a manipulative predator, but he is also a conflicted artist exploring his (romantic?) feelings for Aaron—and indeed the rest of humanity—by making his own films about the people he meets, that he keeps stored like treasured mementos.

Or lost lover letters. And he definitely has a type. When Aaron receives a heart-shaped locket delivered inside a stuffed wolf, he probably should have considered a change of address.

I will endeavor to find out more about the titular antagonist in Creep 2 and The Creep Tapes on AMC. Apparently, Josef’s been a busy boy, making all sorts of new friends.

Ash (2025)

Get off the planet, or don’t! Makes no difference to me.

Directed by musician Tiny Lotus, Ash is an artsy, indulgent amalgam of sci-fi/horror plot points (from Alien, The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers) that never coalesces into anything terribly original or memorable.

Riya Ortiz (Eiza Gonzalez) is the only survivor of a crew of terra-farmers on KOI-442, a dark, distant planet nicknamed Ash, due to its volcanic activity. Her fellow farmers have been murdered and Riya’s own memories of the traumatic incident are bloody, strobe-light fragments, that Tiny Lotus thoughtfully inserts every few minutes or so.

She is soon joined by another crew member, Brion (Aaron Paul), who’s dropped in from the observation satellite after receiving a distress call. Is he here to help or does he have his own agenda?

Ash provides a teachable moment for aspiring directors. If you’re going with a tiny cast, a little time spent on character development would help immeasurably. Riya and Brion are cyphers in space, and might as well be Nancy and Sluggo for all we care.

A 50-50 chance that one of these nonentities has been infected by a vague assimilating presence from the planet’s defense system isn’t really bringing anything hot and tasty to the table.

Add to this a halting narrative told in flashback, a meandering pace, low lighting (when it’s not strobed), and an intrusive techno score, and you have ample reason to skip it.

Tiny Lotus has his moments as a visual stylist, creating a believably unstable alien landscape. But there’s nobody home, dramatically speaking.

When TL reheats a trope from a better movie, it’s just a bitter reminder that Alien, The Thing, etc, are superior examples of dynamic genre filmmaking—that we could be watching instead.

Whether or not Ash is a complete waste of time depends on one’s fondness for a concept that’s already used up several miles of celluloid, namely, who, what, where is the alien menace and who can I trust?

Trust me, you’re not missing anything interesting on planet Ash.