After only a year, The Creep Tapes, Mark Duplass and Patrick Brice’s semi-comedic found-footage horror series, returns. Mind you, these episodes typically only require two, sometimes three, actors, a house, and a handheld camera so it’s not too surprising they can get through them quickly.
Season 1 was intriguing, but soon became repetitive, consisting mostly of a series of remakes of the premise of the original Creep film; with this season the criticism becomes both less relevant (because there is more variety to be found among the episodes’ premises) and more so (simply because there’s even more of Creep now). But I suppose we just have to accept that Mark Duplass’ central, unnamed serial killer character will never be caught.
Indeed, he comes very, very close in the series’ second episode, which takes place in real-time and shows him managing to get caught by the cops dragging a body into the woods, and still talking his way out of it. This episode, and the first, which features Duplass’ character deliberately being caught by a copycat killer (played by current scream-king David Dastmalchian), establish the character as more cunning than the first two films and the first season might suggest.
But the best is the third episode, a comedy gem in which he has devised an elaborate Saw-style escape room, only to discover that his victim is not the brilliant mind he had intended and ends up needing his increasingly exasperated hints to get anywhere.
The series wraps up similarly to the first, with another ambiguous, incestuous encounter with a member of his extended family. So, it’s largely more of the same, which is probably precisely what Shudder wanted, but unlike V/H/S or Creepshow, this seems a difficult franchise to extend indefinitely.
★★★☆☆