Okay...yikes. CREPITUS (Indican Pictures, 2018) is one dark, sick movie. I know there are horror fans who love dark, sick movies, but this one may even be too much for a lot of them. If that sounds good to you, good being a very relative term, then this extremely unpleasant, which is to say nightmarish, wallow in depravity might be just up your down laundry chute into the basement of horror.
It looks a bit slapdash at first, but with the handheld camera, jerky editing, and somewhat disjointed narrative, director and co-writer Haynze Whitmore knows just what he's trying to accomplish, which is to keep us jittery and off-kilter the whole time, and in this he is entirely successful.
The film begins with one of the creepiest main titles sequences I've ever seen--scratchy black-and-white images of scary-looking dolls moving via stop-motion animation--and then takes us right into a sick, abusive family relationship in which teenager Eli (Caitlin Williams) and her little sister Sam (Chalet Lizette Branna) are living in the world's creepiest old house with their sadistic mean-drunk mother, Brandi (Eve Mauro, THE CHAOS EXPERIMENT).
It isn't bad enough that Mother regularly beats and taunts the two girls, who, incidentally, have "X"es slashed into their foreheads. There's also a terrifying entity present in that big, dank, shadowy house (one of the creepiest found locations imaginable) that makes banging noises on the walls of the girls' bedroom and seems to be living in that basement I mentioned earlier.
Naturally, after much scary, suspenseful build-up, in which Eli and Sam discover more and more about how incredibly twisted, psychotic, and homocidal their grandfather was, they both end up down in that basement and discover its bloody, gory, indescribably horrific secret.
One aspect of this worth mentioning is the presence of a cannibalistic killer clown, which I wouldn't have revealed to you if he weren't all over the film's publicity pics, posters, trailers, etc.
This lovely fellow is portrayed by none other than Bill Moseley (HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES, THE CHURCH, OLD 37) in the most sinister, repellent, and utterly sick mode that he can muster, which matches perfectly with this material involving kidnapping children (he's a former "ice cream truck" clown), chaining them up in the basement, and...urrghhh.
As if it weren't enough for the two sisters to contend with their drunken, abusive mom, they have to take on this guy sooner or later, and eventually it's up to ten-year-old Sam to brave the film's most severely awful ordeals herself. Through it all, director Whitmore spares no atrocity in putting her, and us, through the wringer until we think it can't get any worse, after which, needless to say, it does.
For those who get off on that kind of stuff, CREPITUS will certainly be like taking the "Nestea plunge" into the deep end of the bloodbath and wallowing around to their hearts' content. For me, to be honest, it was a stomach-souring and entirely unpleasant bummer. You might even say "just plain evil." One thing's for sure, though--the filmmakers definitely succeeded in what they set out to do.
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