Nerding Day: Peter Benchley's Creature Starring Craig T. Nelson (Patreon)

Peter Benchley’s Creature starring Craig T. Nelson exists, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I’ve tried to deny it a few times over the decades, and it’s only led to me owning multiple copies.

Creature isn’t well-made and it’s not fun to watch. It stars at least one outspoken Conservative ghoul, possibly more. The monster is a Stan Winston Street Shark, which is both as awesome and as shitty as it sounds.

In its desperation to be a serious and inoffensive movie for television audiences, it deleted all the Nazi stuff from Peter Benchley’s source novel, and hear me out, but that was a mistake. As I explained two months ago (or whenever that was, time is meaningless, once I write these things they exist together simultaneously), in Benchley's fully-poseable beach thriller White Shark, the titular creature is a Nazi shark man. As in, a homicidal white supremacist who was willingly transformed into a humanoid shark via cursed Reichscience. The whole book is a build-up to that reveal, and it’s the only thing that makes the story fun or memorable in any way. In the crapped-up made-for-TV adaptation Peter Benchley’s Creature, the monster is a shark-human hybrid grown in the Caribbean by the military, like a CIA cocaine field. It sprouts legs halfway through the movie by just evolving really hard. That's way less cool, fellas. But I get it. You’re gonna sell more commercials without the Nazi gene traitors. This slop bucket was directed by Stuart Gillard, who also made Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3, so he knows a thing or two about hideous monsters.

Gillard’s involvement is doubly appropriate because the Creature is essentially one of the Shredder’s evil mutants. The Creature is three-fifths of a Dark Souls boss. You can summon Peter Benchley’s Creature in Magic: The Gathering. Every 12-year-old in detention has doodled Peter Benchley’s Creature on their math homework. Benchley was simply bold enough to add a swastika and sell it to adults as genre fiction. But watching this movie adaptation back in 1998 as a fan of the book was like watching a reindeer get euthanised while struggling to retain my belief in Santa. It exchanged all the trashy fun of White Shark for plain old trash, perfectly exemplified by a decent-looking shark man who cannot take a second step on camera without shattering the illusion.

The story is still basically the same. Ultra-divorced marine biologist Simon Chase must do battle with a Street Shark after it is accidentally released into the modern world. Like every other blue collar Joe, Chase runs a private research station, except in the movie it’s located in the Caribbean rather than Connecticut, because a Disney executive wanted to gift Craig T. Nelson a tropical vacation. Nelson was one of Disney/ABC’s golden boys at the time thanks to his long-running hit sitcom Coach, co-starring Dick Van Dyke’s brother and the guy who voices Patrick Star. Nelson was sort of like a Tim Allen prototype. Both of them even wound up as leads in Pixar movies. Younger readers might know Nelson as the voice of Mr. Incredible, or as a Fox News peepaw rambling about taxes and Joe Biden (see: “proto-Tim Allen,” above).

In 1998, Coach had just ended, so ABC flew Craig T. Nelson out to St. Lucia to reward him for 200 episodes of hard work with Peter Benchley’s Creature. He may have preferred a watch with Jerry Van Dyke’s face on it. We will never know, and such is the price of art. Now, back to Peter Benchley’s Creature!

We learn that Chase is researching sharks to try and discover a cure for cancer, because his beloved younger brother was diagnosed with Nonspecific Plot Cancer years earlier and recently died. Their entire relationship is condensed into a single high-angle photograph of the two adult men playing football alone in an empty field. I guess a fan took this picture from the bleachers.

Chase’s best friend is still a guy named Tall Man, except now Tall Man is an islander from Saint Lucia rather than a Pequod Native American from New England like he was in the novel, a switch presumably made to accommodate Craig T. Nelson’s retirement present. Tall Man is played by Cress Williams, another established TV actor who at the time was known for Living Single. He and Craig T. Nelson have a natural chemistry that leaves you convinced the two men are dear friends in real life.

Chase’s hot son Max is indeed a late ‘90s teen heartthrob, as Benchley promised in his manuscript:

Max looks like his dad is about to send him to Backstreet Boys camp for the best summer ever. He packed several giant polo shirts, a bandoleer of hair gel, and some roller blades. A shocking amount of Creature’s 3-hour runtime will be devoted to Max riding his roller blades.

As they prepare for the final confrontation, Max polishes his roller blades while Tall Man polishes his shotgun:

Max’s acting career never took off after this movie, and I fully blame the roller blades. They steal every scene.

There has never been a more muggable white kid than Max. Just cruising around on his roller blades having the vacation of his life in this impoverished community. He deserves to get stabbed a little bit, like with a tiny knife. It would build some character. What I’m saying is the movie retains Max and Chase's inherent unlikability from the novel, which is important for televised drama. You want your audience to despise the heroes, it makes the tension more palpable.

Dr. Amanda Mason, who in the novel was a newly-acquainted love interest, is now Chase’s ex-wife and Max’s mother, both because it’s slightly more efficient storytelling for a movie and because male filmmakers in the ‘90s were obsessed with the idea that divorced women will eventually realize what they’ve been missing and reconcile with their ex-husbands. Amanda is played by Kim Cattrall, because Sex and the City hadn’t come out yet. At the time she was merely the lady from Mannequin and Big Trouble in Little China, and to a lesser extent Star Trek VI. Amanda’s team of trained seals from the book is reduced to a single sea lion named Robin Hood and he’s dead fucking meat, because sea lions eat into your Piña Colada budget. We’re not paying for four of these things Peter Benchley, I don’t care what your scepter says.

Speaking of Peter Benchley, he makes a cameo in the film as a WASPy sport fisherman who hooks a pregnant great white shark.

Chase, a lifelong shark pervert and professional ocean lunatic, demands the shark be freed or else he will swim underwater and free it himself. However when Chase cuts the shark free it’s a ponderously boring sequence. It swallows at least sixteen minutes of this movie’s runtime like an insatiable fishman. The shark holds completely still; Benchley and his fellow fishergoons stop tugging on the line. Everyone just waits for Chase to gently nibble the shark loose, and it takes several times the lifespan of many ocean creatures. It’s an action scene meant to introduce us to our heroic lead character and it’s the exact film quality and excitement level of a child’s magic act that did not place in the talent show.

This same scene appears in the novel, during which Benchley has the characters reference his hit novel Jaws:

It’s admittedly kind of clever to turn a meta scene from the novel into a meta scene in the movie by adding Benchley in a cheeky cameo. It becomes less clever later, when the production tosses a bunch of Benchley’s books into the background of a shot. I’d know that Jaws spine anywhere.

He truly is the monarch of the ocean. Back to the movie! The shark man still vomits up its fish lungs and goes on a shark-legged rampage through the community, same as in the novel.

The movie also retains the novel’s finale, in which Chase lures the Creature into a decompression chamber and kills it with sick implosion science, like a Bond villain. Shark goo rockets past Craig T. Nelson’s face, and I say “Craig T. Nelson” and not “Simon Chase” because these are clearly images of the actor Craig T. Nelson narrowly avoiding a shotgun blast of sharkleg gravy. He will never forget this as long as he fucking lives:

We cut to a second reaction shot, presumably because Stuart Gillard said, “OK Craig, we’ve got plenty of ‘the poor make too much money,’ let’s try one where you’re triumphant,” and the result is a frozen glare of haunted fury. It’s the face of a Tucker Carlson guest who just dodged the thickest sharkman rope anyone has ever seen:

The movie adds some truly stupid stuff, which is a thrilling offer considering White Shark was already a landmark of stupid fiction. There’s a team of badass scuba marines, because this is a monster movie made after 1986 so it’s obligated to copy James Cameron’s Aliens as much as possible. Those are the rules. If you can squeak a team of tough soldiers in there, you’d better do it.

The SCUBA badasses stalk the Creature through Chase’s research dungeon while Chase daintily perches on a stool and reads:

Just like in Aliens, the soldiers do absolutely nothing and are killed to a man, including their leader Colm Feore, whom you may remember from Storm of the Century or The Chronicles of Riddick. He’s a real That Guy. A solid member of the That Guy pantheon.

Feore plays Admiral Richland, who was in charge of the shark hybrid program 25 years earlier and has a personal stake in seeing the Creature destroyed. This is another way of saying that an admiral gets eaten by a shark man and the Navy doesn’t even give Chase a phone call to ask him what happened. It’s a pretty good movie. Speaking of which, the best thing the movie adds is Giancarlo Esposito, who plays Lt. Peniston, a military scientist and surrogate father to the Creature. Peniston donated his own blood to create the shark man decades earlier, but this was a side project - a Paul McCartney and Wings, if you will - to his real research, which was creating shark/dolphin hybrids and training them for use in the Vietnam War. During a flashback scene set in 1972, Peniston demonstrates his dolphin sharks by lowering dummies dressed like Rambo enemies into their water tank.

His staff then hooks a sonic beacon onto the Viet Cong dummy, and Peniston explains that the sharkphins have been trained to attack the noise. So, the costumes are meaningless. He dressed up the dummies for no reason. Maybe he was worried the Senate budget committee wouldn’t be able to follow his notes. Also, he and his team were definitely doing little voices for the dolls during each demonstration. Peniston turns to Richland during the demonstration and hisses, “Let these hybrids loose in the rice patties in Vietnam and the VC won’t know what hit ‘em! If only we’d had them a year and a half ago on Delta Patrol, I’d still have my two best friends in all the world. [eternal pause] Have we blown your mind, sir?”

So, he’s another ocean lunatic driven to shark revenge by the horrors of war. He and his mad doctor friend speak to Admiral Richland almost exclusively in riddles. When the commotion of the demonstration wakes up the Creature and Richland asks, “Say, what’ve you got back there, some kind of shark man?” Peniston says “Are you familiar with the theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny?” Rather than executing them both on the spot, Richland asks them to repeat it. Then Peniston and the mad doctor grit their teeth and cry, “All organisms repeat their evolutionary steps in gestation!” It’s the silliest part of the entire movie and I love it. Why are they being so coy about Jabberjaws? We’re already playing God out here to save Peniston’s friends from Charlie, what’s adding two manlegs to a shark going to do? Quit with the riddlin’ and just say, “We made a shark with hands! He breathes sweet delicious air! Come in the back and play chess with him!”

The Creature gets free from its cage almost instantly and kills everyone in the facility except for Peniston and Richland. Peniston traps the Creature in a box but can’t bring himself to kill it because it is his beautiful shark child, so he tosses the box into the ocean instead. Flash forward 25 years and Peniston has been driven insane by the guilt of creating the shark man and letting it live. The locals call him Werewolf because he randomly howls at people.

Werewolf hides under canoes and eats coconuts with the wild eyes of a Sheen. This is what he’s been doing for a quarter century. This is what shark man guilt has done to him.

Peniston does exist in Benchley’s novel, albeit in the book he’s an old Holocaust survivor named Jacob Franks who was forced into helping Nazi scientists create the shark monster. He tells Chase he has been living with the guilt ever since and must help destroy Handy Sharklegs in order to know peace. It’s important to note that both versions of this character have been completely destroyed by the shame of creating one (1) shark/human hybrid that sat undisturbed in a box at the bottom of the ocean for decades. Peniston has more room for guilt because his shark man eats a bunch of people including his friend Doctor Riddles, but still. Shark Man guilt is a powerful thing. Maybe that’s what Peter Benchley was trying to tell us all along.

Tom Reimann is the co-founder of the podcast and streaming network Gamefully Unemployed, where he is busy having a rollerblade summer. Check out their Supernatural watchalong Him-Boos, and their improv mockumentary BADICAL, about the raddest fighting game (n)ever made.

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