Night of the Creeps (1986)

Tagline: The good news is your dates are here… The bad news is, they’re dead.

Curiosity: It’s the movie writer/director Fred Dekker created right before doing The Monster Squad.

Plot: In prologue one (of 35), two aliens attempt to stop a third from firing some sort of capsule out of their spaceship. In prologue two, we cut to Earth in the year 1959, where a college-age couple is parked at the local make out point for some zesty kissings. The girl’s ex-boyfriend Ray (Tom Atkins), a cop, is charged with sending all the sexual revelers home, as there is an escaped homicidal maniac on the loose. He gets his heartbroken, and the couple ignores his orders after they see something fall… FROM OUTER SPACE! They investigate. The dude gets attacked by whatever was in the capsule while the gal gets hacked to pieces by the killer on the loose. Got it? Good.

NOW IT’S 1986. Chris (Jason Lively) is a whiney little whiner looking to get laid. His best friend J.C. (Steve Marshall) tries to set him up with the similarly horny Cynthia (Jill Whitlow), but she’s got a dickhole frat boyfriend named Brad (Allan Kayser, Mama’s Family). Chris and J.C. try to impress Brad’s frat by breaking into the university medical center. Turns out they’ve got a frozen cadaver… THE GUY FROM THE SECOND PROLOGUE! They set him free, he turns out to be a zombie, they run, and then more space zombies appear. Now, only Chris can fight the dangerous hordes. Well, actually Cynthia and the now super crazy Ray do more work. And J.C. figures how the space zombies work. But Chris, uh… whines? Effectively?

Thoughts: Holy set-up! Night of the Creeps takes a while to get going, although I suppose I could have just explained the story as “Space zombies terrify horny college students.” In a way, it feels like a dry run for everything Dekker accomplished with The Monster Squad. Both films are spoofs of but also homages to B-movies. The Monster Squad just happened to be more focused in its love for the Universal monster movies. Creeps, meanwhile, is mostly a zombie flick, but with elements of sci-fi, slasher, and detective movies. It’s perhaps a little too obsessed with its own love of camp (One character even watches Plan 9 From Outer Space, which is perhaps the only time someone has namechecked that movie for credibility, while Ray at one point comments about being in a bad B-movie), but there’s still enough material to put the movie over.

It helps that Dekker sprinkles the film with some great bits and one-liners. Ray is deliciously crazy, with guns a-blazing and suicide a-planning. But the film works more as something to laugh at, whereas The Monster Squad is something to laugh with. Lively comes off as a bitchy jerk, and after a while I started to delight in his failures just a wee bit too much. Also up for hilarity: the film’s homosexual subtext. J.C. tells Chris two things repeatedly: That he loves him and that he wants him to be happy. And he really hammers it home, as if he can’t bring himself to tell Chris just how much he loves him nudge nudge wink wink say no more. Same goes for Brad’s relationship with his frat brothers – he has some designated to carry his shades for him and another to carry his backpack. They’re like his personal groomers. Through in the fact that he’s a frat (and the moustaches! My God the moustaches!), things seem a bit queer, though I’m sure Dekker would deny it.

Still, with B-movies, as long it holds your attention, they win. Night of the Creeps succeeds on the might of genre-bending, pretty good special effects, and that batshit crazy-crazy I lovingly called Detective Ray Cameron.

Reflection: The ending to the Director’s Cut is so, so much better than the theatrical ending.