Night of the Creeps (1986) review: a grisly good time
“Zombies, exploding heads, creepy-crawlies… and a date for the formal.”
If you’ve never heard of Night of the Creeps, you’re in for a treat. Writer and director Fred Dekker struck gold when he made this small sci-fi flick in line with other campy 80s zombie movies. The only problem was he didn’t know it, no one did. The movie tanked at the box office during its initial release, discounting Germany where it found an unlikely audience. Thirty-three years later however, Dekker reflects on the movie’s growing cult classic status: “As far as the legacy, you know, it’s impossible to know what the effect of what you’re doing is going to have. You can hope and you can dream. I continued to be bewildered”.
What made Night of the Creeps so special? One could point to its wacky premise, the delightful performances by the entire cast or even the special effects provided by David Miller and his team who also worked on movies like Tales from the Crypt, A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Terminator. The simple answer is all of the above. Night of the Creeps is a perfect blend of 50s science fiction, film noir, and tongue in cheek horror cliches. It’s also 88 minutes of Tom Atkins at his very best. Still not convinced? Allow me to describe how its quirky charm has made this movie essential viewing for anyone who loves horror…or maybe just anyone who loves Tom Atkins.
Night of the Creeps begins where you might not expect other campy 80s zombie movies to start off. A rogue alien launches a deadly experiment into space and it lands in the woods near a college campus in the 50s. Two lovestruck teens meet their untimely end when one of them gets murdered by an axe wielding maniac and the other becomes the first casualty of the alien slugs who take over the minds of any wandering civilian. This strange cold open is just a taste of the unpredictable nature of the rest of the movie.
We depart from the old-fashioned black and white aesthetic of the 50s and are introduced to Chris and J.C., our two dorky main characters. Enter Cynthia, a beautiful sorority girl who’s not only in a relationship, she’s dating Brad, your typical alpha fraternity bro. This factoid doesn’t deter Chris though. And determined to impress Cynthia, pledges himself and J.C. to a fraternity. To prove themselves to the brotherhood, they just have to do one simple task: rob a cadaver. Not exactly a romantic declaration of love on Chris’s part but if it gets him one step closer to Cynthia, he’s determined to get it done.
After a quick cryogenic lab break in, Chris and J.C. accidentally free the body of the alien slug victim from 27 years ago. The duo run out of the lab “screaming like banshees” and the slugs that have been comatose in a frozen corpse for decades are unleashed onto a campus full of unsuspecting college kids. While Chris and the rest of the teens take up the majority of our screen time, the real star of this movie is Detective Ray Cameron, played by horror legend and sanctioned scream king Tom Atkins who himself cites Night of the Creeps as his favorite film he’s ever worked on, which is saying a lot coming from a man who was also in classics like The Fog, Escape from New York and Lethal Weapon. Detective Cameron was a rookie cop on the night the slugs were first discovered all those years ago and this new resurgence of killings brings him right to the forefront of the story.
Now that we’ve met our main quartet of characters, I think it’s fitting here to talk about the chemistry shared between all the actors. Dekker indicates that this friendly dynamic was one of the best parts of the movie: “And I realized, in reassessing this movie, one of the good things about it, despite my problems with it, one of the things that really works in it is the relationships between these characters. And I think the reason is that that relationship is real, the actors really have that relationship.”
After a few good one liners, an unexpectedly touching confession via tape recorder and your standard 80s montage, we reach the climax of the movie which takes place at a sorority house. It’s a fun, albeit brief, conclusion to this strange movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Throughout the movie we also get small references to horror icons who Dekker holds in high regard. The most obvious of these references is found in the names of our main characters; Romero, Carpenter, Hooper, Cronenberg, Cameron, Landis and Raimi. The movie works as a sincere love letter to the campy 80s zombie movies that came before it wrapped up in a wildly good time. Night of the Creeps is a beautifully chaotic B horror movie that I would recommend to anyone looking to add to their horror collection.
Overall Ratting: ★★★★★
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