CREEP VAN

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND....ER, YEAH, WHATEVER

A cheap, cheerless and indifferently written, directed and performed DTV slasher comedy of no great merit, mostly veering between dull and silly, made very slightly interesting by some graphic gore. Full marks for doing the splattery money shots with practical effects rather than dodgy CGI, but even with all the blood and grue it's still unremakable video sludge. As for the comedy: well, I didn't laugh once.

The basic idea of Creep Van is a homicidal maniac killing people with a customised van: slamming heads with the sliding door, cutting someone in half with the superpowered electric windows, filling the airbag with spikes. Loser Campbell has a dead-end job at a car wash who sees the van is for sale, but then the van's owner starts targeting him and his friends, colleagues and whoever else shows up....

Lloyd Kaufman has a cameo as a dissatisfied customer (along with the score composer Dennis Dreith) and Creep Van certainly has that Troma aura of shoddy incompetence which supposedly doesn't matter if there's ugly sex or a revolting gore effect every so often. It's not as full-on bad taste as Troma's most famous product like The Toxic Avenger and Class Of Nuke 'Em High - the two main reasons why I refuse to watch Troma films any more - but it's got that same lousy atmosphere along with the attitude that actual film-making technique isn't really important.

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