THE CREEP TAPES: SEASON ONE
****
Directed by Patrick Brice.
Starring Mark Duplass, Mike Luciano, Josh Fadem, Krisha Fairchild, David Nordstrom, Josh Ruben, John Craven.
Horror, USA, 180 mins, Cert 15.
Released in the UK on DVD & Blu-ray via Acorn Media International on 12th May 2025.
Here we go again with another series based on a movie, watering down what made the original movie so good and making it more palatable for casual TV viewers to enjoy. That may be a cynical viewpoint, but history has proved it to be a not inaccurate one. However, the difference here is that Patrick Brice’s CREEP actually benefits from the TV format, giving you everything that made that movie work but in a condensed form that doesn’t compromise on the quality.
Mark Duplass returns as over-friendly psychopath Peachfuzz, and the tapes that we are watching are the tapes that he has collected of him tricking his victims into filming their own demise. Each episode involves somebody with a camera encountering the killer as he befriends them before turning weird and making it difficult for said victim to leave before, inevitably, becoming the next tape in his collection.
Each episode is named after the victim, so episode one is called MIKE and plays out in a very similar way to the original movie as Peachfuzz (as he is credited) – or Jeff Daniels (not that one), as he calls himself here – invites Mike (Mike Luciano) to his(?) remote house to film him under the pretence of making an audition tape so he can go to acting school. ‘Jeff’ soon starts acting weird by suddenly losing his temper and being overly demanding, but every time Mike tries to leave, the lure of more money brings him back, until ‘Jeff’ fully loses it and the inevitable happens.
Episode two is called ELLIOT and sees the titular Elliot (David Nordstrom) bizarrely encounter Peachfuzz, after landing via parachute, where Elliot is trying to spot a very rare bird. Through friendly persuasion, Peachfuzz ends up driving Elliot’s car while Peachfuzz soon uses the bird spotter’s hobby against him and things turn nasty. See the pattern forming? Wait until you get to the JEREMY episode for peak Duplass mischief.
There is a formula here and each episode sticks to it – Peachfuzz encounters somebody, asks them to film him while he does something, he’ll jump out on them in his wolf mask to make them nervous, then play the victim so they feel sorry for him, before losing it and finishing them off. It can be accused of being repetitive, but Duplass is brilliant, switching from awkward friendliness to intense aggression in an instant. In Peachfuzz, he has created a killer who is simultaneously as lethal and as much fun as Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter, adding camp where necessary but with something deadly going on behind the eyes.
The reason THE CREEP TAPES works so well is that it sticks rigidly to the formula laid down by the original movie. In most cases, when a popular movie/franchise gets made into a TV series, ways to fill certain time slots and hit certain beats must be found. As well as the creators not shooting their bolt too early in the season to keep viewers coming back each week, which inevitably means expanding (or padding, depending on your viewpoint) the universe, bringing in new characters, changing the mythology, etc. Then you have twenty-four episodes covering several plot threads that don’t really add up to much, other than making you wish they’d just made another sequel and not wasted everybody’s time.
THE CREEP TAPES, however, takes the ASH VS. EVIL DEAD approach of offering up six half-hour (or thereabouts) episodes that pretty much do exactly what the source movie did, in half the time. If you have seen CREEP then you already know that Peachfuzz is a killer so the sense of tension the movie had is missing, but we already knew who the killer was in the HALLOWEEN & FRIDAY THE 13TH sequels and we still kept coming back (until they changed the formula, funnily enough.) Being shorter the episodes don’t go for tension, instead focusing on Duplass and his ability to make Peachfuzz inhabit different scenarios convincing his victims that he is just misunderstood, putting them in an awkward position where they can’t leave him.
In a format that perfectly fits the found footage style, the writing and central performance from Mark Duplass come together to make THE CREEP TAPES a lot of darkly amusing fun in six self-contained, concise episodes. If Duplass, Patrick Brice and the rest of the filmmaking team can keep up that consistency without diluting the formula, then there is no reason THE CREEP TAPES cannot continue the adventures of Peachfuzz and his strangely alluring methods of mayhem in the future.
Chris Ward