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| Night of the Creeps, The |
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  (5/10)
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Runtime: 88 |
| Public Rating: 9.11 (9 votes) |
Director: Fred Dekker |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Horror/Comedy |
Year: 1986 |
| Writer(s): Fred Dekker |
| Distributor: HBO Video |
| Reviewed by: Mel Valentin |
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A low-budget, sporadically entertaining cheesefest, directed with marginal skill by writer/director Fred Dekker (whose other mediocre efforts include The Monster Squad and Robocop 3), Night of the Creeps is strictly for nostalgic fans of 80s horror comedies. Not even an exponentially expanding colony of slithering space slugs (the film's best effect), exploding heads (no worries, they're far too unrealistic to elicit anything beyond a chuckle) and a gratuitous flamethrower in action can save Night of the Creeps from being a lackluster, ultimately forgettable genre film.
Night of the Creeps opens in 1959, with a meteorite (actually a canister containing a failed scientific experiment from outer space) flashing across the night sky and crash landing near a university campus. At the same time, an escaped mental patient, rusty ax in hand, is on the loose, busy stalking sorority girls. The two plot strands come together when a generic jock type decides to leave Lover’s Lane with his equally generic blonde girlfriend to investigate the crash site. He smartly decides to leave his girlfriend alone in his parked convertible while he goes for a stroll in the woods. The audience can easily guess what happens next to these disposable characters.
Flash-forward to the present (actually 1986, the year Night of the Creeps was made and released), Corman University (named after Roger Corman, exploitation auteur known for his low-budget contributions to science fiction and horror during the 1950s and 1960s): the local fraternities and sororities are in the middle of pledge week. Two geeky, Gap-wearing college students, Chris Romero (Jason Lively) and J.C. Hooper (Steve Marshall), are eager to prove themselves and enter one of the fraternities. Chris is also motivated by his desire for sorority sister Cynthia Cronenberg (Jill Whitlow). If the character surnames are starting to sound familiar, they should. The characters are named after well-known horror directors (J.C.’s middle name also happens to be “Carpenter”). Two other miscellaneous characters are named Landis and Raimi. If those names mean nothing to you, then your interest in the proceedings (assuming you had any) will rapidly disappear.
In order to obtain membership in a popular fraternity, Chris and J.C. are ordered by the fraternity president, Brad (Allan Kayser), to steal a corpse from the local morgue and dump it in front of a rival fraternity house. By coincidence, inside the morgue, our hapless lead characters find themselves inside a secret, locked room, complete with “corpsicle” encased in a glass tube (his private parts are artfully hidden by well-placed frost crystals) and flashing lightboards straight out of Star Trek: The Original Series. Chris and J.C. release the corpse from its frozen tomb. The corpse hosts the dormant space slugs. The slugs can animate corpses, turning them into slow moving, if deadly, zombies (and hosts for their young).
Enter Ray Cameron (horror veteran Tom Atkins), a gruff-voiced, paunchy, hard drinking, cigarette-smoking detective with a not-so-secret connection to the tragic events that occurred more than twenty-five years ago. As the space slugs rack up victims from the generic cast of characters, Detective Cameron and the remaining survivors team up to defeat the rampaging zombies. Night of the Creeps culminates with a student formal that goes horrifically awry and a sorority house under siege (but not before the audience is gratefully treated to some eye-catching, gratuitous nudity), with one character wielding a flamethrower and another a shotgun in an attempt to dispatch the space slugs and their no-longer human hosts.
Night of the Creeps suffers from lame, unfunny dialogue, generic characters, awkward line readings by an unrehearsed cast, crudely staged action scenes, and deliberate pacing that fails to make the zombie threat a real one until the last twenty minutes. By then, though, terminal boredom has all but set in. Who lives and who dies doesn't matter. Here's a hint, though: you'll know within moments of a character's introduction whether they'll become space slug fodder. The rest of the film is just as predictable and unengaging. Unfortunately, Night of the Creeps never rises, or rather sinks, into the "so bad, it's good" category that would have made it passable entertainment. Fans of 80s horror comedies (you know who you are) are better off renting or re-renting Dan O’Bannon’s black comedy/gorefest, Return of the Living Dead instead.
© Mel Valentin, 21st February, 2005
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