Horror Movie Review: Creeping Crawling (2012)

An anthology telling three stories involving everyone’s favourite thing, bugs except with a more modern twist. Instead of an in your face bug-fest, here we get tales connected to peoples struggle in society to be accepted & the lengths they go to meet a standard set by others.

Sounds interesting, right? Well it doesn’t quite live up to its promise.

All good anthologies should have a good frame, the story that begins the movie & the one that connects all the tales together ending in a satisfying way. That isn’t the case here, instead we get an eccentric entomologist just telling the stories to two high school students for an interview…I think.

No effort is put into it with the doctor being laughably bad & the two student characters being mixing both boring & childish behaviour.

So the first story surrounds a wannabe model that will do anything to lose those extra pounds she believes she has including ingesting tapeworm. After not following the rules she finds the one that is inside of her has grown to a shocking size.

Again, the concept here is exciting & it promises a lot that it fails to deliver on. The story surrounding a desperate model that really doesn’t need to lose any weight was interesting & the actor portrayed it well. Sadly the rest of the short is forgettable up until the final scene where we see the tapeworm removed slowly from her backside.

The second & best of the bunch involve an unstable trainee nurse taking on the task of looking after a comatose young man while his mother is away. She begins to believe that he wants her to save him so they can be together.

I quite enjoyed this tale as it has plenty of intrigue & keeps you guessing up until the final few minutes. It’s well acted although the nurse’s more crazy moments can come across cheesy rather than threatening.

It also leaves a few too many questions unanswered at the end; things that would have made it feel a bit more complete.

The final story & definitely the strangest (and most likely to make your skin crawl) involves a standard office nerd who just seems to be unlucky in love. These co-workers flip between wanting to help him & convincing each other that he is a secret serial killer.

Well it turns out that they’ve right, not only is he murdering the woman he hooks up with but he has a kink that can only be described as ‘too much’. A lifelong obsession with bugs & exposure to a graphic adult magazine as a child has warped his sexual needs to such an extent that he tries to incorporate them into any naked encounter he has with the opposite sex.

Oh & he likes sticking his dick in a warm jar of worms.

The tongue in cheek approach here works well in that it makes the more graphic & gross scenes stand out as they come when you least expect it. Unfortunately the ending lacks impact as unexpected as it might be. It’s almost like they realised that it was going on too long & needed to end so just thought, ‘fuck it’.

So the 3 stories end & it’s near impossible to work out how they relate to the eccentric doctor’s story telling. It’s confusing as hell & it’s probably best you just discount the framing story all together.

Cheaply filmed, it looks rough which also effects the impact of the more ‘gross’ bug scenes but the worst are the night scenes, horrifically done making it a real struggle to see anything that is going on. This is highlighted the most in the 3rd story with a significant scene in particular being wasted because of the shoddy camera work.

That aside the 3 stories offer some interesting, thought-provoking & out right gross moments. It’s hardly a competent story as they are all effectively separate stories with ‘bugs’ being the only similarities but there is fun to be had.