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During the height of a 6-day Christmas blizzard, nurse Faith remains home to care for her mysteriously afflicted daughter Charm. Faith diligently stays vigilant over her daughter’s inexplicable condition with test after test and maintaining Charm’s constant body temperature between 102 to 104.4 degrees, seemingly stabilizing Charm’s condition. If the temperature exceeds beyond, Charm transmogrifies into a barbed humanoid creature. While Faith works on a compound cure, Liz and Kory, a sibling pair of Jesus zealots, break into the house seeking shelter out of the deadly snowstorm. Faith has no other choice but to let them stay the night until the storm subsides but the appearance of Charm’s at-home care and the young girl’s sudden seizures and erratic behavior sends Liz into savior mode, meddling into more than she can comprehend. Yet, something else lurks inside the house, between the shadows, and beneath the veil of reality that is way more terrifying.
Even though Christmas might be long over and all the gaudy and brilliantly lit decorates are stowed away back into Grandma’s attic that doesn’t mean the holiday horror train has to depart the station. And I’m not talking about no Polar Express with the edging on creepy motion capture animation. I’m talking about “The Cleansing Hour’s” Damien LeVeck’s Twas the Night Before Christmas-inspired titled “A Creature Was Stirring.” The equivocal creature feature set in the throes of a raging blizzard and inside a very decked the halls house is penned by debut screenwriter Shannon Wells under the original title of “Good Luck, Nightingale.” Aimed to be more than what meets the eye, “A Creature Was Stirring” blends the involuntary struggles of drug addiction with potent secretions of supernaturalism. The U.S. production was shot in Louisville, Kentucky, produced by LeVeck, wife Natalie, as well as “Scare Package” producers Aaron B. Koontz and Cameron Burns with Vladislav Severtsev (“The Bride”) under the production companies Skubalon, 10/09 Films, and Paper Street Pictures.
Topping the bill as Faith is “This Is Us” star Chrissy Metz, portraying a nurse practitioner and mother desperate on concocting a cure to her daughter’s strange, monstrous manifesting condition. Metz brings the multifaceted mania between being rock solid and stringent with medical checks and procedures and being able to turn aggressive when the moment calls for it, especially swinging a screwed-spiked baseball bat. This underlines an underlying secret or hidden predicament viewers will be dipped into and begin processing all the little traces of one-offs that don’t necessary make sense to an already peculiar narrative. Then, there’s Charm, played by Annalise Basso (“Oculus”), in constant oversight, constantly mutable, and urging to constantly be free from her mother’s impervious iron grip to lighten up. Basso retains angsty opposition while tossing moments of reflective consideration for her mother and for herself, disquieting the teetering tranquility when Liz and Kory come into play. Respectively played by “Halloween” ‘07’s Scout Taylor-Compton and “Stake Land’s” Connor Paolo, siblings Liz and Kory stir the pot that’s slowly simmering to a boil as one religious dogmatist and one eager to break the constraints of his sister’s purity with sex and drugs complicate the strained mother-daughter relationship with their intrinsic quirks that expose a deeper, rooted-to-reality problem. The now generational scream queen Compton dons colorful dreads and a large Messiah back tattoo amongst a high and mighty attitude while Paolo can be praised for the sarcasm brought out from the scripted dialogue. Each of the four principals are inherently different and clash, in a good way, to provoke complications.
Drug addiction has infiltrated horror years ago and have been the basis of many notable films such as Abel Ferrara’s “The Addiction,” Larry Fessenden’s “Habit,” and Frank Henelotter’s “Brain Damage” to name a few from the massive lot. “A Creature Was Stirring” taps into that same vein as LeVeck’s injects and shoots up his own interpretation of horrors with withdrawals. Long time addicts suffer through agonizing, powerful withdrawals that screenwriter Shannon Wells incorporates symptomatically with a figurative approach and while Wells’ story invokes colorfully rich characters and enigmatic tale of terror, brought to life by LeVeck’s vibrantly warm and glow Christmas adorned and atmospheric house, the finished feature, that really has nothing to do with Christmas oddly enough, feels uneven when revealing the irony of surprise doesn’t become catchall illumination. The most ambiguous part about the tale is the spiny-signified creature, a mutated, zoomorphic porcupine of sorts, to represent ferocity of the withdrawn drug with its hypodermic needle-like defense mechanism and malevolence nature. The shadowy man-thing is given such a threadbare association between Charm’s anecdotal encounter with large rodent and its manifestation metamorphosis into the fold that the hostile has hardly any staying power as a villain and, like a rodent, really does feel just like a mouse was stirring as it scurries arbitrarily throughout the house but not all is negative as there are scenes that make you go holy crap when recollecting character and creature interactive moments that suddenly click and make sense, often coinciding and juxtaposed against really neat interior cinematography bathed in mixture of hard light and soft glows.
Well Go USA Entertainment presents “A Creature Was Stirring” on a high-definition Blu-ray home video. The AVC encoded, 1080p, BD25 has soft illumination but a grading design that’s befits the ’tis the season paradigm with the primary color warmth radiating out from Christmas lights strung up around the house and the beaming brilliance of white battery-operated light-up decorations. Between the crude adornment lighting, some lighter translucent gels, and with a splash of black-and-white, Alexander Chinnic cinematography, presented in an anamorphic widescreen 1.78:1, resembles a rave clad fitting into the drug theme as an echo of the one character’s pill-popping, molly-dropping past. Details become diffused by the varying, indiscriminate incandescence and shadowy fields that play into the creature’s tenebrific threat, but those same shadows are often deep without posterization. The English 5.1 DTS-HD master audio achieves the goal of the very title of something stirring inside creating rustling movements and spiny-shifting clacking, coursing through the back and side channels and maintaining an even keeled LFE. Space awareness is key for close quartered tension and that’s rendered well in the design. Dialogue comes off without a hitch and is elevated above the rest of the tracks with no issues with compression faults or a fractured recording. English SDH subtitles are available. Like most Well Go USA releases, “A Creature Was Stirring” shoulders only Well Go USA preview trailers with no real bonus features of its own in the semi-static main menu but what we do get is a better than modest laid out standard Amaray Blu-ray package with a lightly titled embossed cardboard O-slipcover and on the back two different texture types, a polaroid slick abutted against the smooth cardboard. Image design is a greatly detailed silhouette of the porcupine creature looming over the house. The same image is also on the Blu-ray cover with a simple red-beaded or red-string light encircling the title on the disc. There is no insert inside. Rated R for violence, bloody images, drug context, language, and some sexual suggestion, the 96-minute Blu-ray comes region A locked.
Last Rites: Chrissy Metz battling a deformative disease, drug addiction, an angsty teen, two home invasive siblings, and a large porcupine monstrosity all in the name of “A Creature Was Stirring” is the prickly cold turkey suspenser this side of the New Year.
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