Night of the Creeps (1986)

Night of the Creeps

10/10

***** Guess what? Spoilers be below. *******

One of my favorite films. Do not expect objectivity.

Our film starts out in stark black and white in the olden' 50's. We got the car parkin', meteor flying through the night, and an escaped mental patient homicidal killer on the loose. Did I mention the escaped alien? You'd think that shoving that many tropes into the first 5 minutes would be bad, but it works here. I can tell you about the beginning since it doesn't really give anything away. Aliens over Earth lose a prisoner alien to an escape pod (the meteor) which flies over 'Lover's Lane'. Dumb guy wants to check it out. Guy gets infected, girls gets hacked by killer, cop shows up too late. I've had nightmares less formulated than this, but then I am an evil god of chaos so that's not a good yardstick.

Character time. Almost all of the characters are named after famous horror people. We have Cronenberg, Carpenter, Romero, and even Raimi(!). The university is named Corman. It's a nice homage to the masters. (Remember, over a million="homage," under a million= rip-off). Our 'Hero' is Jason, his best friend is Steve, the 'Girl' is Cindy, and Detective Cameron is Tom Atkins, aka 'Badass'. The only other character I would point out, and this is only for his dialogue, is the janitor in the morgue/frozen specimen/cryology lab. Upon being interviewed by Badass, he tells the Det. that they ran out "screaming like banshees". I think the clip is on YouTube, and it's priceless. The rest of the characters, mostly sorority and fraternity folk, are basically meat.

Back to the diaglogue. This movie has some of the most quotable lines outside of "Evil Dead". Some of these have to be seen in the movie to get context and flavor.

Detective arriving at morgue- "Thrill me"

Detective arriving at sorority house- "Girls, the good news is that your dates are here. The bad news is that they're dead."

So Hero (with Steve) spots Girl, and gets the bright idea to pledge Beta house to impress girl. Beta house tells them to steal a corpse and put it on a rival frat's lawn. Ahem, even in the 80's corpses were pretty hard to find on a university. Maybe it was Kentucky? (sorry). Anyhoo, turns out corpse is dumb guy from the beginning of the movie, and they let him free, and all sort of mayhem ensues, including "screaming like banshees!".

I'm not going to spoil how the wackiness goes down, because it is too good to spoil. Check the 2nd above dialogue quote for a hint. I forgot to mention that there is also a lawnmower, shotguns, and a flamethrower used as weapons.

The acting is straight up 80's, except for Atkins. You could poke holes in the 2D characters in the movie. But I would blame the script on that point. It seems like the screenwriter had great ideas which came off well, but he/she couldn't handle extened dialog. Speaking of which, another reason I don't like cats.

Tallies- 'shrieking banshees', 2. Movie cliches, um, all of them (?). Zombies, busful. Dumb frat guys, see previous. Monkeys, none (!). Minus 1/2 point for no monkeys, plus 1 point for making me jump three times.

This is a must see, in my opinion. Right now it is on Fearnet OnDemand (as of 2/9/09), so catch it while you can. It's goofy, somewhat gorey, and a heckuva lotta fun. Like I said, I can't find it anywhere besides Ebay (even Netflix), so give it a whirl.