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.

EXTRA TERRESTRIAL VISITORS (aka POD PEOPLE)

As a lifelong (aka since 1988) fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000, I have a lot of love for EXTRA TERRESTRIAL VISITORS, better known by its US distribution title POD PEOPLE. Episode 303 is unarguably one of the finest MST3K episodes ever produced. It was the perfect pairing of bad movie with sharp witted comedians. But as the years rolled on, I began to wonder...

Outside of the Godzilla and Gamera films (and a smattering of others), I had never seen a single film used by the MST3K crew outside of the show. Can I really say that I've seen EXTRA TERRESTRIAL VISITORS if the only way I've seen it is in an edited, compressed version with people talking over it? Can I really say that I've seen THE UNEARTHLY, MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE or CITY LIMITS? I suppose I can. I know plenty of people who will claim to have read certain books when in reality they only listened to the audio book. Is there really that much of a difference? 

So I decided today that I would spend 80 minutes of my life watching EXTRA TERRESTRIAL VISITORS without the accompaniment of Joel and the Bots. I would try to push the jokes I know by heart out of my mind. I would give it, for what it's worth, an honest chance. How did that work out for me? Well…

EXTRA TERRESTRIAL VISITORS is all about a family and a pop music group under assault by a murderous alien after three poachers destroy the recently crashed alien's egg nest. The only surviving egg ends up in the hands of the family's young son (and budding entomologist), Tommy. The egg eventually hatches and Tommy begins a friendship with the young alien, a curious and relatively harmless little chap Tommy names Trumpy (he looks like ALF with a snout). But Trumpy's mother (or father or whatever) is roaming the forest, obliterating the cast with surprising efficiency, all in search for her (or his or whatever) offspring. How will Tommy's family react when they find out he's been sheltering a potentially dangerous animal? And moreover, who will survive and what will be left of them?

I closed out that paragraph with a quote from the theatrical poster for THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. Why did I do that? Because I wanted to mention, if only for a sentence, a good horror movie. That way, this review won't be completely negative. Because EXTRA TERRESTRIAL VISITORS is NOT a good horror movie. I know, right? I can't believe it either!

That isn't to say that the film is uninteresting. Had I said that, I would be lying. But the reason the film is interesting has nothing to do with the quality of the material on display. It has to do with the fact that EXTRA TERRESTRIAL VISITORS is a Frankenstein film. Not literally, mind you, but figuratively. The film was directed by Juan Piquer Simon, a Spanish filmmaker who was, up until this films release in 1983, best known for his double dose of nastiness, SEA DEVILS and PIECES, the latter being one of the finest bits of over-the-top slasher film action ever made. EXTRA TERRESTRIAL VISITORS began life as a cheapo sci-fi/horror film about an alien running amok in the woods, only to be forcibly transformed into a more family friendly picture when Spielberg's E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL made a killing at the box office.

You can see the seams everywhere you look. What child would sympathize or identify with our pop music group? They're characters clearly meant to be body count fodder and a few seemed to have been hired for their willingness to wear skimpy outfits and disrobe for the camera. But because this is now a family film, the skimpy clothing becomes blouses and blue jeans in a matter of scenes, and the sole shower scene is nudity free. The aliens rack up quite the body count as the film goes along. But because this is now a family film, all those murder scenes are bloodless. I swear, you can actually hear Juan Piquer Simon audibly gritting his teeth as Tommy's grandfather is casually killed by a slap to the belly by one of the aliens, a scene which probably ended in a gory disembowelment before the studio heads decided to neuter the whole film.

Another casualty of the studio decision was the aliens themselves. I can't imagine Simon was thinking of furry, long nosed creatures, which look a bit like someone hollowed out a plush toy and then stuck a child inside of it before sewing it back up, when he started working on the film. But as this was now a family friendly film, I suppose the sight of Tommy cavorting with some kind of giant, drooling arachnid-looking beast wouldn't have appealed to the kiddies all that much. So Trumpy and his mother (or father or whatever) became non-intimidating, cute little beasties with glowing eyes and the ability to make a room full of junk dance around in the air. The overall adorableness of the monsters kills all suspense and terror before it can even start.

So what then are we left with? Well, not much. We have a cast full of nondescript characters that don't do an awful lot, a duo of villains that threaten a chick with rape before being quickly shown the door, and a whole lot of day-for-night photography rendered even more laughable by the overuse of fog machines. There's also a handful of original, though horrible, ditties that play on the soundtrack (I'm sure you know the words to one of them already, don't you?) and some wholly unconvincing special effects detailing the crash landing of the aliens and their various telekinetic powers.

It's shit, really. But it is pretty far from being intolerable shit. Trumpy the Alien has more personality than Trumpy the 45^th President of the United States. The cast contains the always likable Ian Sera and some lovely ladies. The bad dub job lends the film some unintentional hilarity (and at least Tommy sounds like a child, unlike Bob from THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY). But let's be honest, the version featured on MST3K was a helluva lot better, not only because of the hilarious commentary, but because it cut out a decent amount of the films padding. There are long stretches of nothing to be found in EXTRA TERRESTRIAL VISITORS and they make an otherwise brief and steadily paced turd feel like its taking forever to hit the water.

So in summary, EXTRA TERRESTRIAL VISITORS is still best viewed as Episode 303. Sure, you'll miss out on some profanity (f-bombs in a family friendly film, eh?) and some bickering between the protagonists, but you won't have to make up your own jokes as the film goes along. Win-win, really.