Kennelco Film Diary

(2004) dir. Christopher Smith
viewed: 10/15/07

Not that Severance (2006) was so excellent or anything, but I decided to go ahead and dig up writer/director Christopher Smith’s earlier film, Creep, starring Franka Potente nonetheless.

It’s a horror film set in the London Underground.  Potente plays a girl who is going out to try and shag George Clooney, but ends up locked in a tube station (Charing Cross Rd.) and at the mercy of a mutant serial killer who could easily have found a home in The Descent (2005).  He’s suggested to have been from some childcare facility or testing area down in the catacombs of the London Underground.  It actually reminded me of this film that I watched on the BBC many years ago that was about this enormous underground facility in London that was developed for hiding during either WWII or the Cold War that was never really used.  I have done some research and have not been able to come up with the movie’s title, so my apologies.

Subway stations, particularly abandoned or lost ones, or even just the underground spaces are a subgenre in a sense, a subgenre of setting, if that is enough for a genre.  A hidden world, just beneath our feet.  The metaphors are probably fairly easy to glean so I don’t know that I need to go into them.  I have to say, though, that I am not too afraid of being chopped to bits by an albino, mutant scavenger when I descend into Muni.  My fears are actually more that I’ve missed the last train and been stranded downtown, needing to catch a $20+ cab ride to get home.