Thank God for Donald Pleasence. Without him, this terrible effort from director Lee Madden (he of The Night God Screamed (1971), Ghost Fever (1986), a film so miserable that Madden chose to sign it Alan Smithee, and several biker movies) would have been utterly unbearable. It’s not like he’s giving a particularly good performance – very far from it in fact., It’s just that his twitchy, bug-eyed insanity is the only thing about this otherwise lifeless film that shows ay trace of energy or verve.

Pleasence plays Axel McGregor, a Hemingwayesque world-famous author and big game hunter, badly mauled by a black panther while on an expedition into the jungles of Thailand. He becomes obsessed with the creature, and has it caught and placed on his private island estate where he dismisses his servants and announces to the panther his plans to release it, hunt it (with a rifle loaded with a single bullet) and kill it to restore his wounded manhood. But he’s not alone on the island – his grown-up daughters Leslie (Nancy Kwan) and Georgia (Jennifer Rhodes), granddaughter Peggy (Lesly Fine), and tour guide named Ross (producer Ross Hagen) have turned up and the panther proves to be a tougher adversary than McGregor was expecting and has soon killed family dog Socrates and Georgia and Peggy has gone missing…

It’s Moby Dick with a panther (with a dash of The Most Dangerous Game (1932) thrown in for good measure) and every bit as ridiculous as that makes it sound. Contrived nonsense from beginning to end, it’s one of those films where people traipse around pretty jungle locations (let’s give credit where it’s due, Permphol Cheyaroon’s photography is often rather nice though we could have done without the panther’s point-of-view shots) and chatter on endlessly about things that are of no real importance to the plot, such that it is. It’s certainly nowhere near as exiting as the multitude of posters and video sleeves desperately try to make it out to be (it was also released as Out of the Darkness). It hints, half-heartedly, at a supernatural connection between McGregor and the panther and its decision to make its home in a ruined temple, giving it a sort of godlike feel, are both intriguing notions that Hugh Smith’s script does absolutely nothing with.

Madden, never a particularly stylish director, struggles to find ways to enliven it all, resorting to some odd freeze frames and slow-motion choices that often don’t make a lot of sense. Some of the panther attacks look distressingly too real for comfort (more credit to whoever the stunt people were) but the use of slow-motion inevitably robs them of any sense of urgency or immediacy. The initial attack on McGregor is particularly poorly done with no sense that he’s actually in in real danger, Pleasence and the cat never appearing in the same shot (understandably) and the actor merely rolling around on the ground giving his only understated performance in the film when a good bout of hysteria would have suited the scene a lot better.

In fairness, there was little he could do with Smith’s contrived script, the sort of writing that expects us to accept all sorts of idiocy in service of an ill-thought-out plot. Peggy, when Smith remembers her, is left stranded on a bamboo bridge for ages in a rainstorm with none of the other characters trying to do anything to rescue her until the script needs them to and the idea that McGregor needs to reassert his manhood through the hunt is laughable to begin with but just becomes ludicrous by the end. And when we reach that end, the film stumbles to a halt leaving the battle between McGregor and the panther unresolved, offering just a bizarre cross-fade that briefly turns him into the cat in one of the clumsiest and funniest “the hunter has become the hunted” metaphors ever shot.

The supporting cast are a mediocre bunch for the most part, though Hagen’s boisterous tour guide seems to have been written with the express purpose of annoying every fibre of your being (and to Hagen’s credit, it works). Not a single one of them is able to do anything with Smith’s terrible dialogue, all of them fighting a losing battle with Smith’s flabby script. Pleasence’s wild-eyed over-emoting is everything here – if you can tolerate his mad ravings, you’ll have a lot more fun with the film than those who can’t. Otherwise, it’s a terrible mess with absolutely nothing to commend it. “You will never come Out of the Darkness alive” the re-release poster ads assure us. Part way through Night Creature you may well start wondering if death might not be a blessed relief from all this. A poor quality fan re-edit exists on YouTube that cuts away much of the flab but still manages to tell you the bulk of the story. The fact that it runs just 13 minutes probably tells you everything you need to know really…