A hideous, misshapen, leathery brute stalks the bayou in Creature, but that's just Sid Haig. A crusty staple of cult flicks from Spider Baby to The Devil's Rejects, Haig is a reliably creepy presence, and he's about the only thing worth watching in this inept slide into the murky depths of cinematic crapola. Monstrously stupid, clumsily directed and only theoretically "written," Creature sports a young cast of photogenic nobodies who must have flunked their auditions to be Power Rangers.

Six of these attractive idiots cram themselves into a minivan on a road trip to New Orleans, with a brief layover to get high and boff each others brains out deep in the back woods. They don't take the hint, when, during a pitstop for munchies at a rusty truck stop, they encounter a band of inbred yokels who spin tall tails of "Lockjaw," an incestuous, cannibalistic, half-human, half-alligator mutant who terrorizes the swamp lands. After a muddy slog through about 45 minutes of exposition and lesbian make-out scenes, the ridiculous rubber-suited monster finally starts chomping on nubile flesh, much of it gratuitously naked. Worse, the kills — the money shots of cheesy horror flicks — mostly happen off-screen.

The script (if one was ever finished), was seemingly passed through a paper shredder, tossed in the air then randomly taped back together. A meth-addled hummingbird apparently handled continuity; the plot is so disjointed that you'll swear they made it up as the cameras rolled. At one point, a dude is shot clean through the leg with a hunting rifle — a moment later he breaks into a full-on Olympic sprint. The hero, who's supposed to be a former Navy Seal, can't come up with a better plan than playing slap-and-tickle with the killer reptile man, and when the budget runs out, the monster just sort of lamely slips down a sinkhole in slow motion.

Creature is so laughably pathetic that it's worth a few chuckles, but the really amazing thing is that huckster Sid Sheinberg put up the cash to dump this slime-covered turd into more than 1,500 theaters nationwide, proving that hope, like evil swamp monsters, is eternal.

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