[Retro Review] NIGHT OF THE CREEPS
Sometimes when you yearn so hard to see a specific movie that is just outside of your reach, a level of anticipation builds up inside of you that cannot be fed sufficiently. [All ye Watchmen obsessives, take note. Ha Ha!] That has always been my concern about Fred Dekker’s Night of the Creeps. It was (technically, still is!) so horrendously unavailable (why, exactly, I do not know!) that the only way it existed to me was in snatches of dialogue with other film fans who HAD seen it many years ago.
I heard about the fact that Slither was nothing more than an “overt homage” to this movie. I heard about the cracking zingers that made up the film’s dialogue. I was told about the sorority girl packing a flame-thrower, the casual nudity, the inventive gore effects. It just built and built and built in my mind. I had to see this movie.
Thanks to a never-ending level of persistence and an undying hunger to just experience this zombie flick from the man that gave me The Monster Squad, I finally laid my hands on a surprisingly decent copy and sat down with ‘Jimm’ to quench my “thirst” once and for all.
It couldn’t possibly play as well as it has done in my head for the last ten years eh?
First of all, for those not in the know, Night of the Creeps follows an alien experiment that goes wrong in outer space, causing said alien entities to crash land on Earth in 1959 and subsequently infect a nearby fraternity member. He duly turns into a staggering zombie that ends up cryogenically frozen on university grounds to be experimented on. Flash forward to the early 1980s and two ‘geeks’, pledging for a fraternity, accidentally thaw this corpse out causing his alien-infected zombie maurading to infect the entire campus with alien parasites, and thus unleashing a band of killer zombies that only the two geeks, a popular girl and an embittered cop can make a stand against.
I dug the living crap out of this movie, honest. It was just SO much fun. It was made in such a way that, in a lot of ways, it captures the exact same vibe (but different genre jumping-off points!) that Pineapple Express wonderfully grabbed on to twenty-two years later. In the same way that that movie was anchored with stellar, pitch-perfect performances from Seth Rogen and James Franco, here we have the insanely gorgeous Jill Whitlow (who went on to do nothing of worth but did have Porky’s and a tiny role in Weird Science on her CV prior to this!) and Tom Akins (a great B-movie actor who has taken up roles in everything from John Carpenter’s The Fog and Escape From New York to mainstream stuff like Lethal Weapon and bargain basement fare like Maniac Cop) who is a real joy to watch here.
Obviously Akins is helped along greatly by the fact that he gets to verbalise the film’s awesome ‘tagline’, come the finale: “Ladies, I’ve got some good news and some bad news: The good news is your dates are here! The bad news is they’re dead!”
For true movie fans, the film is an outright joy – there’s all the little winks and nods in respect to the genre it is playing around with (all the major characters have surnames paying homage to famous directors like Cronenberg, Cameron, Rami, Carpenter, Hooper etc.). Not to mention the fact that it brilliantly captures the right tone between being a horror AND a comedy, whilst managing to pay tribute to the 50s B-movie, the Romero style zombie movie and the late 70s/early 80s Grindhouse style B-movie.
Night of the Creeps might have some ropey acting the majority of time. Its effects might not stand up in the eyes of modern, spoilt, cynical viewers today. And the ‘siege’ mentality in the film’s climax may be getting going and ending at round about the same time BUT it’s a truly brilliant piece of cult horror comedy. It more than lived up to the years of anticipation surrounding it.
Now all the fuckers have got to do is give it a bell-and-whistle comprehensive commerative DVD release like they did with The Monster Squad.
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4 Responses to “[Retro Review] NIGHT OF THE CREEPS”
I prefer this movie so much to The Monster Squad when it comes to Dekker. I love this movie, I pretty much grew up watching this, The Thing, Night of the Living Dead and From Beyond.
Out of curiosity which ending did you see Gazz?
Also, Maniac Cop bargain basement? Surely you jest.
Well, when I ordered it I got told it came with “two versions”. Seemingly it didn’t.
I saw the one when it evolves to the morning after and Jill Witlow is standing amongst the crowd and the possessed dog comes to her feet and she bends down to stroke it, and one of the “creeps” jumps out of the dogs mouth and it ends on a flash to black right there!
What is the alternative to this Grundy?
And I dig Maniac Cop quite a bit (it’s featured in the next 3-Way. Not the next one to be published though, the next one we host. The next one to be published is delayed due to “Jimm” being a “perfectionist”!!!) but it is happily ‘rough-around-the-edges’, don’t you think?
The alternate, which is the original ending has the charred zombified corpse of Tom Akins staggering down the street and collapsing in front of a cemetery. Then the slugs bust out of his cranium and slither off into said cemetery, at which point the UFO from the beginning comes into frame and starts looking for slugs with beams of light.
It’s a better ending.
That does sound freakin sweet! I so hope this gets a proper dvd release soon so i can see it.
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