Town Creek aka Blood Creek (2009)

(In French, On Cable TV, October 2022) As obvious as it may sound, the one fundamental difference between reviewing relatively new films and older ones is context—when it comes to classic films, we know how historical events turned out, we know how many more movies a star made, we understand what arc a director’s career took, and all of this feeds into a very different critical perspective than writing the first draft of film history in which anything may happen tomorrow. Most of the time, stable context solidifies decades years later. In other cases, it comes sooner. Joel Schumacher, for instance, died at 80 years of age in 2020, putting a final punctuation mark to a career that lasted longer than most people expect. While he gained directorial fame in 1985 with St. Elmo’s Fire, he had been working in the industry since 1970, starting at the relatively seasoned age of 30. As a result, his death caught a few people by surprise—and it feels weird to look at a 2009 film like Blood Creek and place it in a relatively solid historical perspective. There’s no doubt, for instance, what this film was completed on the descending slope of Schumacher’s career: While he gained near-household name recognition during his 1990s streak from Flatliners to Batman & Robin, that last film clearly marked the high-water mark of his career. The 2000s saw him direct a few solid genre pieces, but by the end of the decade he was down to minor straight-to-video thrillers—and his last work was in 2011. Blood Creek, alas, clearly wasn’t a prestige project: it feels more or less on an equal footing as other low-budget independent horror films of the time. Schumacher’s lifelong eye for good cinematography means that the result feels more polished, but in the end, we’re still fighting Nazi zombies on a farm. The cast, however, is intriguing: In addition to Dominic Purcell in one of the lead roles, we have pre-fame Henry Cavill as the lead, and then-unknown Michael Fassbinder as the antagonist—a cast that would cost about ten times as much, not even five years later. Still, the result isn’t much of a film. Half-intriguing ideas and one big special effects showcase don’t combine to offer more than a mediocre rural horror film. It’s clear that Blood Creek was a mercenary project for Schumacher—perhaps in the hopes of a payday or simply proving he could still deliver in anticipation of other projects. Little of this makes the film any better by itself—but in the context of a long career that spanned growing fame and a return to obscurity, it makes for another poignant milestone.