Verdict
Summary
I liked the home invaders meet a monster in a house movie within A Creature Was Stirring, but I absolutely despised the social drama / bad mom movie it ended up being, and the ending sucks, man. Big time.
Plot:
Two home invaders break into a home where a mother has imprisoned her daughter, who might be a monster.
Review:
It’s a cold winter’s night, and a couple of desperate home invaders (played by Scout Taylor-Compton and Connor Paolo) break into a home in the middle of the night to escape the freezing temperatures, and they’re met by the woman of the house, an imposing nurse named Faith (Chrissy Metz) who is skittish about revealing too many details about her daughter Charm (Annalise Basso) to these two interlopers who simply will not leave the house even as Faith threatens them with violence. The four of them are stuck together for the night, but the longer the two outsiders stay, the sooner they realize that Faith is basically keeping Charm prisoner in the house. Charm, as we have come to observe, has some issues: She’ll spike a high fever, act erratic and start to have seizures, but then her body changes and she literally transforms into a porcupine creature for a few minutes at a time until her temperature cools down and then Faith can deal with her again with weird experimental serums she has concocted in her makeshift laboratory. With the two outsiders at the mercy of the crazy lady who runs the house and the monster girl locked up in her room, these people are going to have the craziest night of their lives … if they can survive until morning!
The basic premise of A Creature Was Stirring is very cool and intriguing, and the movie presents us with some really radical body transformations and a monster that looks amazing, and if that’s where the movie left it, this would be an instant recommendation, but unfortunately the movie spins around and tries to surprise us with a twist and then another crazy last second twist at the end, and the movie ends up being a total bummer the likes of which will make you hate what you’ve just watched. At the midway point the film takes a sharp turn into a flashback that explains who Faith is and what she’s all about, and then the end flips it all around and makes it seem like everything we’ve seen is actually something else entirely, and so the film messes around too much with our perceptions and throws the entire creature feature subgenre into the trash and demands that you forget all about that and focus on something else instead. That’s no bueno, people. I liked the home invaders meet a monster in a house movie within A Creature Was Stirring, but I absolutely despised the social drama / bad mom movie it ended up being, and the ending sucks, man. Big time. From director Damien Leveck, who must’ve made everyone angry when they saw this movie for the first time with an audience. The end credit scene is the pits.
Well Go USA’s Blu-ray and DVD release of A Creature Was Stirring is out on February 13th. There are some bonus trailers on the disc, but no extra features.
