NIGHT OF THE CREEPS

Fred Dekker’s 1986 thrilling directorial debut, NIGHT OF THE CREEPS, is a classic example of 80s cult cinema. It’s a glorious pastiche, a quilt of campy goodness, a Frankenstein’s Monster built from the scraps of the wonderful midnight movies that came before it… I could fill this screen with superlatives. I could shower it with praise from dawn till dusk. I could make sweet love to it like it were a farm animal.

We enter the world of NIGHT OF THE CREEPS as two well worn story lines from classic B-films play out in the halcyon days of the late 1950s. In the first story line, an alien canister comes crashing down to Earth, landing just outside lover’s lane. In the second, an escaped maniac with an ax roams the lonely streets at night. These two bits of narrative collide, resulting in a pair of catastrophes. After driving to a lonely stretch of road to investigate the crash site with his girlfriend, straight-laced Johnny has an alien slug jump down his throat. On the opposite end of the unlucky spectrum, Johnny’s girlfriend meets her fate at the end of the maniac’s ax.

So far, so goddamn glorious. We move forward to 1986. It’s Pledge Week at good ol’ Corman University. We meet our heroes, Chris Romero and J.C. (and yes, most of the characters and locations in this film are named after horror film icons), two dweebs with zero prospects. Chris is in love with the beautiful Cynthia, a sorority girl sweetheart currently dating the loathsome Brad, a fraternity boy douche bag. In an attempt to impress Cynthia, Chris and J.C. approach the Bradster about joining his fraternity. Brad gives them a little job to do, a prank that involves stealing a dead body and leaving it on a rival fraternity’s doorstep. Our heroes reluctantly accept the challenge.

Unfortunately, they choose the wrong cadaver from the hospital. They pick the cryogenically frozen body of Johnny. When Johnny turns out to be not quite dead, the boys freak out and run away, unaware that they’ve just kickstarted a nasty alien invasion. Johnny’s walking corpse is currently playing host to a small swarm of alien slugs. Nasty little buggers, these slugs crawl into the mouths of their hosts before migrating to the brain. That’s where they lay their eggs, turning the walking dead into traveling incubators.

And that’s all I’m going to say about the plot of NIGHT OF THE CREEPS.

NIGHT OF THE CREEPS is built on the back of 50 years of horror and science fiction films. As such it is chock full of references and homages, both subtle and glaringly obvious. It is definitely inspired by ALIEN. The slug creatures are clearly pulled from Cronenberg’s nightmare STD shocker SHIVERS. A bus driver’s eyes bug out of his skull a split second before a car crash, a la MAD MAX. A faceless zombie looks suspiciously like he crawled out of POLTERGEIST. The film not only uses the Roger Corman “every 10 minutes” structure, but Dick Miller shows up as a character named Walter. You could watch this film a dozen or more times and still not get all the little in-jokes and shout outs.

But despite being a love letter to both popular and cult genre cinema, NIGHT OF THE CREEPS never once feels derivative or unoriginal. The tone of the film remains celebratory, not masturbatory (if you don’t understand the difference, watch the opening scene of this film on YouTube. Then watch KILL BILL, VOL. 1. After that. you’ll know exactly what I mean), and Dekker keeps everything cruising along with a steady influx of sharp direction and witty dialogue. In fact, the thing that lifts NIGHT OF THE CREEPS into the realm of genuine classic are the characters, lovable and memorable, played by the likes of Tom Atkins, Jason Lively and Jill Whitlow.

NIGHT OF THE CREEPS is pure brain candy, one of the best sci-fi/horror flicks ever made. I know full well that my opinion here is completely biased. After all, I love this movie more than I love my family. That’s why everyone reading this should know that when I say that the only real flaw I can find in this movie is that it’s not 16 hours long, well… that’s probably not an opinion shared by the majority. As a low budget flick, the movie is short on action but heavy on set up. As a result, I know a lot of people feel the ending is a bit anticlimactic. I can understand that absolute horseshit bit of criticism from the goddamn mouth breathers who fail to recognize brilliance when it’s staring them in their slack jawed, mongoloid faces, but hey, that’s just like their opinion, man, and I think they can fuck off.

Seriously though, I am well aware that the film is in fact flawed, but I still think NIGHT OF THE CREEPS is simply wonderful. We all have those movies that we’ve seen dozens and dozens of times over the years. We all have those movies that we will stop and watch whenever we find them playing on TV. We all have those movies that seem to be finely tuned to our individual pleasure centers. This is one of those movies for me. To be honest, I should not have even written this as it is completely useless as a review. This is just a fanboy rant right now, just me telling you that I have a serious long term crush on this film. If you have yet to watch NIGHT OF THE CREEPS, please do so soon. Who knows? You might just fall in love with it, too.

MUTILATIONS

Larry Thomas' 1986 sci-fi horror flick MUTILATIONS exists somewhere between THE GALAXY INVADER and EQUINOX. It begins with a 3 minute credit sequence of stock space photography and Casio music before introducing us to our characters, all of whom played by actors clearly reading their lines off of cue cards. The dialogue is forced and unnatural. It sounds like someone reading from a Wikipedia article. For example, after one of his students remarks that people look at him funny when he mentions aliens, Professor McFarland, our brave and learned hero, opines: 

PROFESSOR: “Roger, people react that way one, because they're ignorant and two, because many are frightened of the possibility that intelligent life may exist.” 

That leads to the following exchange. 

FEMALE STUDENT: “But NASA has made it more acceptable in popular thinking by sending out space probes to prove or disprove the existence of life on other planets in our own solar system.”

PROFESSOR: “And there is a group in Washington known as SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence that's conducting all sorts of reports into and investigations of UFO incidents and the possible communication of radio telescopes.” 

MALE STUDENT: “But didn't the US Air Force just begins receiving UF reports in 1947?”

*** NOTE: And yes, that is a 100% accurate transcription. I didn't fuck up. They did. ***

And on and on it goes for several minutes, offering up all the exposition it deems necessary in an attempt to make its slim plot seem credible. It soon becomes apparent that even though we are inside an astronomy classroom, scientific rigor isn't the Professor's strong suit. We hear all about ancient aliens, weird luminous lights in the night skies and cattle mutilations. All this talk of little green men prompts the Professor and his class to take a field trip to a place called Berry Hill, a farming town beset by alleged extra terrestrial hooligans.

Once our crew arrives in Berry Hill, MUTILATIONS stops being a slow and disastrous mess of a sci-fi flick and becomes… well, it never stops being disastrous, but it does become a hell of a lot of fun. Even more surprisingly, it becomes quite impressive. Unlike the Galaxy Invaders of Don Dohler, the aliens in MUTILATIONS are largely presented as giant stop motion animated beasties (with the occasional use of puppetry). It's DIY Harryhausen stuff and while it certainly isn't convincing, I was impressed by how much effort Thomas and Co. put into the man vs. alien battle scenes. Most filmmakers on a micro budget would have just thrown together a cheap costume for their creatures and called it a day.

I'm of the opinion that a bad practical effect will always be infinitely better than a bad digital effect, if only because that bad practical effect existed in reality. Someone had to make the appliance, glue it down, put paint all over it, etc. Someone had to build the spacecraft, design the model, manipulate it on camera, etc. There's a charm to practical special effects, especially the less than stellar kind. I love 1950s sci-fi B movies with their obvious plastic flying saucers and rubber suit aliens. I love it when I can see the zipper, although I love it even more when I can't. Digital effects will never have that charm. These days, you can create massive space battles or epic war scenes with thousands and thousands of ships, planes, orcs, humans, aliens, whatever the hell you want with computers. The only limiting factor it seems is the imagination of the filmmakers and the patience of the people doing the programming. But while digital effects can be stunning, transformative and even transcendent bits of movie magic… there's nothing really there.

That's why watching a rubber suit monster feels different than watching a CGI creation. One is actually on screen, actually walking through sets, actually existing. The other is just polygons and meshes and textures. So when MUTILATIONS starts throwing plastic spacecraft at the house our heroes are currently hiding in, I smiled like an idiot. When Professor McFarland faced off against a stop motion alien monster (in poorly composited fashion, no less), I was giddy with nerdy joy. There's a terrific scene where an alien punches through a woman's back, it's scaly claw like hand erupting from her stomach. Instead of pulling the woman free, the Professor proceeds to cut the alien's arm off at the elbow. THEN they pull the appendage from the woman's stomach. It's corny, not very well executed and all around fucking great.

The final act of the film happens in tunnels that resemble, probably not coincidentally, the sets from PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES. All the lighting becomes gelled, just blues, pinks and reds. The camera work become hyperactive, real Raimi-esque with sharp whips and pans punctuated by unexpected close-ups. I stopped caring about the crappy dialogue and crappier performances. I didn't care that they didn't just buy a mouse from a pet shop and instead used an oversized stuffed rat from a toy store. I didn't care anymore that the film was cheap and sloppy.

More effort went into making MUTILATIONS than probably went into making half of all slasher films. You can tell that the people making this film gave a shit about it and were actually trying to produce something worthy of an audience. This film would never win any awards. It won't be mentioned in the same breath as ALIEN or THE THING. Well, fuck accolades. This movie has heart and a mountain of low budget charm. The effects work might not be Hollywood caliber, but it is certainly far more ambitious than what you would normally see in a super low budget sci-fi B flick from the 1980s. It's a shame that Larry Thomas never made another film (hell, most people involved with MUTILATIONS never worked again on a film). This was a damn good start. He could have been a cult favorite by now.

THE BLOB (1958) & THE BLOB (1988)

Something has crash landed in the woods outside a small Pennsylvania town. It isn't a space ship or some interplanetary probe. It's a meteorite, a small chunk of stone that just so happens to be filled with a sentient, viscous nightmare. In other words, a Blob. Its reign of terror begins simple enough, slowly devouring an old hermit. It then sloppily eats a nurse, then a doctor, then a mechanic before finally gobbling down a dozen or so late night moviegoers at the town cinema. Its ravenous appetite is limitless. Unfortunately, the only people aware of its presence are Steve and Jane, two teenage lovebirds unable to convince the townsfolk that their lives are in danger. 

THE BLOB fits nicely into the Red Scare sci-fi b-movie trend of the 1950s. The setting is small town America where the coppers are all stand-up guys and the kids are viewed as delinquents in need of stricter parental supervision. Everything looks like a Norman Rockwell painting. Introduced into this environment is the “outsider”, the Blob, an entity that doesn't just kill the hapless denizens of Bumblefuck, PA, but assimilates them. Every body it absorbs makes it larger, more indestructible and, to fit the “fear the Russians” allegory, every ounce of flesh consumed makes it more and more Red. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS played a more sophisticated game with its Red Scare paranoia, with alien pods that replace everyday Americans with mindless (Communist) clones, but the underlying threat in THE BLOB isn't that much different. The more it consumes, the more it grows. Each flag waving individual it devours only makes it a more dangerous, more complicated threat to handle.

Like other 1950s sci-fi flicks, THE BLOB isn't just a great bit of sociopolitical commentary, it's also a great bit of fun. It had a smaller budget than most films of its kind and one would imagine that budget would have constrained the imagination of its director, Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr. The fact that the film is as impressive as it is visually is a minor miracle. The Blob of THE BLOB is not your typical 1950s sci-fi monster. It isn't humanoid in design. It couldn't be faked through miniatures or puppets. Today, the effects are as expected, not mind blowing or even very convincing, but the sheer level of ingenuity on display in the film is definitely worthy of respect. By choosing not to use your average, ordinary alien beastie in their film, Yeaworth, Jr. and Co. created a schlocky shocker that feels unique within the pantheon of Alien Invasion flicks.

Of course, THE BLOB is also well known for being the feature film debut of Steve McQueen. He delivers a fine performance in the film (though no one would ever confuse the 28 year old actor for a teenager), understated and immediately likeable. In fact, the entire film is well acted, well scored, well filmed and well directed. It's a thoroughly enjoyable flick, one completely deserving of its cult status. But I think the most remarkable thing about THE BLOB is how refreshing it feels to watch. 

There are no military men in THE BLOB. Not a single Army vehicle rolls into town to stop the menace. There's no cornball humor either, relying instead on subtle (and not so subtle) reversals of popular sci-fi tropes for its humor. It's also remarkably playful at times. I can imagine what it must have been like to sit in the glorious Colonial Theater in Phoenixville, PA, and watch the film play out. After all, the Colonial was the theater used for the famous scene of the Blob, massive and blood red, pouring from the projectionist booth into the auditorium, hungrily devouring every person it touches. It's a gag William Castle would have been envious of and it must have been quite the fright for the filmgoers catching a light night showing of the film.

At the climax, it isn't the military or a team of scientists that save the town from the great Red Scare. It's a collection of teenagers, cops, firefighters and other ordinary citizens. The only thing missing is a shot of Old Glory blowing in the breeze.

In 1988, Chuck Russell was brought aboard to helm a remake of THE BLOB by studio execs at TriStar. Russell had proven himself capable of helming large scale, effects driven films, even though he was still a newcomer to the director's chair. His previous film was his first, the mega money making A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS. He was a good choice and he turned in good work, but just like John Carpenter's re-imagining of Christian Nyby and Howard Hawk's THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, success was not in the cards for 1988's THE BLOB.

The remake begins by feeling an awful lot like the original. In fact, were it not for the hair styles sported by the cast, you might think this film was set in the 1950s. The boys all walk around in their varsity jackets with “gee golly” expressions on their faces. They're embarrassed to buy condoms in front of a priest and awkwardly meet their girlfriend's parents before going out on dates. They even go up to lookout point to neck and fool around. The film feels odd, especially for a sci-fi horror flick from the late 1980s. For the first third of the film, it feels drenched in the same quaint, quiet atmosphere of its forebear.

But the 1980s doesn't stay off the screen for long. While the film does follow the original almost beat for beat, the graphic violence that was the hallmark of 1980s horror shows up in full force once the Blob takes its first victim. And it doesn't let up. Thanks to advancements in special effects (and a nearly 19 million dollar budget, a massive increase from 110,000 spent on the original), the Blob of this THE BLOB is a much more terrifying beast. Yeaworth, Jr. was happy to give us a few glimpses of a man covered in slime from time to time, but Russell and his effects crew really put on a nasty show here. A man is pulled headfirst into a sink drain. A woman is crushed inside a telephone booth. A child is dissolved before our eyes. It's a wonderfully grotesque film with a monster that is far more proactive in its rampage, slinging tendrils through the air, slamming itself down on people running through the streets and even, in a scene that makes no logical sense, exploding out of the corpse of a young Erika Eleniak.

The graphic violence isn't the only bit of 1980s horror to worm its way inside the film. The cynicism that ran rampant through the decade is here in full force as well. Unlike the original, the Blob of this film isn't a space entity that accidentally crashed on Earth. It's a government experiment, a nasty bit of biological warfare that was shot into space because it was too dangerous to be kept on Earth. When it finally makes its return, the organism has been mutated by its time orbiting the planet. A group of military and government scientists show up, quarantine the town and go about trying to capture the Blob. Not for humanitarian reasons, of course. No, they want to use it again as a weapon. As a result, this small town with its small people is to be considered expendable.

Russell's THE BLOB feels a bit too angry at times, or at the very least, a bit too bitter. The inclusion of government conspiracies and military men willing to let men, women and children die horrible deaths to secure the Blob… I would be lying if I said that the 1988 version of the film is far less enjoyable than the original, at least on a narrative level. There was a charming simplicity to the original film and that simplicity is gone here. The government boys and military men show up too late in the film to ever feel like more than just another plot complication. 1980s horror was rife with anti-authoritarian sentiment, but I'm not sure I can ever fully equate government men with a sloppy ball of acidic slime. That's what the film wants me to do. It wants to me to think that there are not two monsters in the film, the government and the Blob. There's just one. Anything government related is monstrous.

The film even ends with a psychotic preacher holding a bit of the Blob hostage in a glass container, waiting for the moment when God instructs him to unleash it once again on the world. All authorities are corrupt, all institutions evil. This is par for the course with many 80s horror films and really, by turning the Blob into just another man-made monstrosity, that's ultimately what Russell's film becomes. Just a horror movie. The sci-fi elements go by the wayside and the humor largely goes with it. I do enjoy the 1988 version of THE BLOB. I think it's a gross, gooey, great time. I just don't think the underlying cynicism is earned. It feels forced and predictable, slapped on as an extra bit of edgy social commentary. The Red Scare allegory of the original worked because it felt organic. The remake is just angry for the sake of being angry.

While the original film went on to make a lot of money, Russell's film sank at the box office. Both films have since become cult classics and the reason for that lies squarely with their antagonists. The Blob of THE BLOB is a unique, semi-Lovecraftian nightmare, one of the most unique hostile lifeforms ever seen on screen. It wasn't just an oversized bug or a humanoid creature. It's something different, something not easily categorized. A giant, blood red, acidic amoeba with a bad case of the munchies, the Blob has lived on in popular culture for a damn good reason. It's too cool of a creature, too hideous and repulsive, to easily ignore. It sticks in your memory as easily as it sticks to tender flesh. And once it grabs hold, it's nigh impossible to remove. It sticks to your brain. Once seen, it isn't easily forgotten.

INVISIBLE INVADERS

In my review of CREATURE, I noted that one of the few interesting ideas the film had was to make the alien capable of reanimating corpses to use as slaves, but after writing that, I began to wonder where I had seen that idea before. It wasn’t PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. It was something I saw as a kid, some black and white sci-fi movie that used to play from time to time on cable. A few Google searches later, I found it.

INVISIBLE INVADERS is a B movie made on the cheap by Edward Cahn, a surprisingly prolific schlockmeister with over a hundred movies on his filmography. It begins as yet another anti-science paranoia piece as a freak lab accident kills Dr. Karol Noymann. After Noymann’s funeral, the doctor’s reanimated corpse shows up in the home of Noymann’s colleague, Dr. Adam Penner. The corpse, or rather the alien inhabiting it, warns Penner that its forces will invade and destroy Earth in less than 24 hours unless all the nations on the planet surrender. When that surrender never happens, the invisible invaders descend on the planet, taking over corpses and destroying everything in their path.

Eventually, the military puts together a crack team of scientists, Dr. Penner, his daughter Phyllis and her friend, Dr. John Lamont. Army Major Bruce Jay is assigned as security. They hole up inside a bunker and begin their research. After managing to capture an alien, they run experiment after experiment, running into failure after failure. Then they stumble on the key: sound waves. Using sound guns (yes, sound guns), the crew is finally able to render the aliens visible to the naked eye (as well as turn them into a puddle of muck). They try desperately to contact the military to share this news. Unfortunately, their radio frequencies are jammed by the signals from a nearby alien ship. With the world about to end, they set off to destroy the ship, sound guns in hand.

Now that sounds exciting and interesting but the film really isn’t all that well put together. Much of it is downright laughable, something that would be a problem if this film were attempting to provide anything more than cheesy entertainment. The biggest problem with the film is that it is simply too cheaply made. There are endless scenes of stock footage in the film. When the aliens decide to announce their plans to the people of Earth, they don’t bother using television or radio. That would have necessitated the building of more sets. Instead, they make their way into a hockey game, killing the announcer and using the speaker system to announce their invasion. Not exactly the most effective way of getting your message across, but Cahn apparently had to work with whatever stock footage he could get his hands on (by the way, you don’t have to look hard to notice people clapping all throughout the alien speech). When you have to make your film work around available stock footage, you’re bound to run into problems.

Another big negative is that there is a constant voice over narration. Instead of dramatizing events, this booming, ultra-serious voice just tells us what is going on. Not only is this infuriatingly cheap, it’s also mostly unnecessary. We don’t need a voice over to tell us “the invader, finished with the corpse, left it and again became invisible” if we’re watching it happen on screen. It makes the whole film feel like a reenactment and that sucks much of the immediacy from the film.

But even though the entire film feels like it was made for twenty dollars (face it, making the aliens invisible was really only done to save money) and the zombies - I’m sorry, alien controlled bodies – are just ridiculous looking guys in business suits with pancake make-up smeared on their faces, the film does manage to be an enjoyable piece of B movie fluff. You could do a lot worse than spend 70 minutes with INVISIBLE INVADERS. Yes, it lacks the visual and intellectual audacity that the best science fiction movies contained, but we’re talking about a movie about invisible aliens that dissolve into goo when you blast them with sound waves. It’s fun and it’s goofy. And what more could you ask of a cheap sci-fi B movie? Just turn off your brain and give it a watch.