Donald Pleasance is one of those actors whom everyone loves no matter the film they appear in. Cushing, Lee, Price – all appeared in a stinker or two and despite the shoddy material, they still managed to rise above it and at least make it somewhat palatable. That is the exact case with Night Creature, a not-so terrible film by all accounts, yet one only slightly worth it for the performance by Pleasance.

Night Creature gives us another version of that classic battle between man and nature, one seen many times over in every form of media. The man in question is the aforementioned Pleasance, who is a big game hunter and the nature of the equation is a panther or black leopard he has brought to his private island so that he might hunt it in more familiar territory. There is one problem though, and that being that the giant cat is a wild thing, an animal that also hunts and now it has decided to just that to the very men who have entrapped it. Making things just a little worse is the fact that the hunter’s family has arrived on the island when things are not exactly as safe as they could be.

The biggest fault of this movie is the poor direction and the strange editing choices, especially when it came to the transitions between scenes. The final picture looked more like a high school film project than anything else and yet, the film was still fairly enjoyable as you watched Pleasance attempt to fix his mistake and go slowly crazy over it. Seeing Pleasance as helpless as he is towards the latter half of the film is quite a bit of fun in one respect, but you can empathize with the man when the bodies start dropping and the fear he feels for his family.

Also known as Out of Darkness, Night Creature is not the scariest film to ever come along, but it is effective in creating a tense situation, one that clearly portrays the danger that one might face should they ever decide to try and tame one of nature’s more dangerous animals. If MacGregor, the character Pleasance portrays, had simply taken up chess or some other such hobby instead of killing animals for sport, maybe he would have been better off.

2 out of 5