Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for The Creep Tapes S1E3, “Jeremy” (written by Mark Duplass & Patrick Brice and directed by Patrick Brice)
Jeremy (Josh Fadem) hosts some kind of YouTube program called Gotcha! (I’m presuming there is an exclamation point). As The Creep Tapes S1E3 begins, he tells the camera about how this week’s installment will surpass his previous exposé on “the toxic wasteland hypocrisy that is big pharma,” and we know immediately what kind of guy this is. I’ll avoid epithets.
It’s unclear how Jeremy expected his evening with Father Tom Derkin (Mark Duplass) to go, but Father Tom immediately puts him on his back foot. He startles Jeremy from around a corner as Jeremy approaches the front door, and once they are in the house, he just kind of disappears while Jeremy prepares for their interview.
This leads Jeremy to go searching for Tom, whom he ultimately hears moaning through a closed door. Is Father Tom masturbating? No, it turns out he’s on an exercise machine. He tells Jeremy it is to exorcise demons. Just give him a minute.
When Father Tom emerges, he offers Jeremy a drink and proceeds to taunt him when he asks for water, saying that he could turn that water into wine. But then, Tom becomes more friendly and talks about how excited he was to receive Jeremy’s email, which asked Tom to participate in what Jeremy described as a combination of God’s Not Dead and My Dinner with Andre. Those are two of Tom’s favorite films!
That’s pretty hilarious, but I will say that Duplass’s character in “Jeremy” doesn’t quite do it for me in the same way as in the Creep films and the first two episodes of The Creep Tapes. Perhaps my own disposition towards priests is playing a role here, but Father Tom just doesn’t have the charisma of the previous versions of our serial killer protagonist, as far as I’m concerned.
That’s OK, though, because Jeremy is probably the most unlikeable victim we’ve seen to this point. He’s unable to play along with his own conceit and starts yelling at Father Tom about the sins of the church. At that point, you might as well just put out a solo video ranting about the issue, but Father Tom isn’t done with the interview, even if Jeremy is ready to be.
Father Tom promises to show Jeremy a secret about the church that no one knows, which ends up being a video of himself wearing the wolf mask while a priest holding a cross attempts to perform an exorcism on him. When this ends, Tom tells Jeremy that he tried to repress his demons when he was younger, but that didn’t work. He came to consciousness over the dead body of Father Dom Derkin and, at that point, made an oath to become a priest himself—Father Tom Derkin, in the late man’s honor.
Now, Jeremy is getting scared, and we enter the part of the story where Duplass’s character is pretending to be nice while at the same time being menacing. He won’t accept Jeremy’s claim that he now believes in God but insists they’ll get there, and he’s not going to let Jeremy leave until it’s true.
Father Tom wants Jeremy to get into a bathtub for a baptism, but as Jeremy takes off his belt, he hits Tom across the face with it and runs away. He gets to his car, but Tom is just behind him and takes up a position in front of the car, telling Jeremy that he’s going to have to run him over in order to get away.
Does he have it in him? He may, but as Jeremy tries to start the car, Tom holds up the wires he cut from it to keep it from starting. And from there, it’s a short path to Jeremy’s death.
Overall, I think S1E3 is the weakest entry in The Creep Tapes thus far. I can see what Duplass and Brice were thinking in attempting a twist on our usual Creep story, but making both characters rather unlikeable just ends up making the entry less compelling.
The funniest bit of the episode (besides Tom acting like God’s Not Dead and My Dinner with Andre are by any lights comparable films) is when Tom compares himself to Jesus through Footprints as he carries Jeremy’s body at the end, but even this feels a bit too on the nose.
I don’t want to seem too harsh, as I still enjoyed this episode of The Creep Tapes. I’m just wondering, for the first time, if the premise of the series might start to get old by the time we’re done.
See you next week.
