Night of the Creeps: 06 of 31 Horror Movies I Have Never Seen!

There's a fine line between good and bad, rich and bland, light and dark, etc.  Horror movies are the same.  Some simply try to hard, miss the mark, and show us something unbelievable that it hardly passes as farce.  Other's still go all the way cheesy and just become dull as the plot continues.  It's walking that fine line between silly and serious that makes for good old fashioned camp.  Fred Dekker's Night of the Creeps, walks that line quite well.

The film opens with the silliest homage to Alien that I have ever seen with these bizarre looking chubby Alien's chasing each other down a hallway to a dump hatch where a mysterious tube is released into space.  Cut to the 1950s, said object hits the Earth at the same time as some psychopath is chopping the hell out of a girl in a convertible.  Cut FURTHER to the present day, 1986, and we meet our lovable 80s protagonists who will drive the rest of the story.  Think Shivers/Night of the Living Dead, and to make it even better, all of the characters are named after famous Horror movie directors.

What I liked about this movie is that it is knowingly poking fun at the entire genre, while simultaneously trying to creep out the audience (pun intended) as much as possible.  After seeing the creepy crawlies on screen, you can see where James Gunn pulled some inspiration for Slither.  Equally, it should be said that Creeps takes influence from David Cronenberg's Shivers, and even names the female lead of the story Cynthia Cronenberg.  The point of course is that the tongue in cheek approach works quite nicely here.  You get the feeling that these are typical 80s college kids caught up in a bizarre situation when really all they want to worry about is who's getting with who and the upcoming Formal Dance.

Dekker followed this with Monster Squad in the 1987, further blending humor and camp with action horror goodness.  That is not to say that Creeps doesn't suffer from some of the typical issues in 80s horror films.  Namely, there are moments where characters are inexplicably removed from a scene, leaving us to wonder what became of them only to come back to them in a half hazard manner as if nothing ever happened in the first place.  It's something that always makes me think that they were in editing bay after a long day of everything going wrong and cutting it together when they looked at each other, shrugged, and said "Fuck it, no one will notice."

However, the film pokes fun at this fact when Jason Lively's character Chris is being grilled by Tom Atkin's Det. Ray Cameron, he responds with "Aside from trying to come clean about a murder you committed, what is the point of this story?"  The line got a chuckle out of me as I was starting to wonder the exact same thing.  Also, anyone who doesn't find it absolutely hilarious when a dude gets a slug spit into his mouth by a zombie dog puppet may not have the sense of humor required for these kind of movies.  In fact, they probably shouldn't be watching horror movies at all, let alone anything made for mainstream 80s Cinemas.

All in all, Night of the Creeps is a fun movie with a couple of decently creepy gags, some great gore effects, smart ass one liners, and a friggin flame thrower, so it wasn't half bad in my book.  It was certainly a welcome relief to yesterday's viewing of Nightmare City, which was so bad I still can't get over it.

4 out of 5 skulls.