Review by Oliver Longden
About halfway through Creepozoids I was asking myself a single question: is this just a cynical attempt to rip off Alien with the budget almost entirely removed and replaced by the lurking promise of seeing Linnea Quigley’s breasts? By the end of the film I had the answer: no, you can’t just accuse it of ripping off Alien because it’s just as happy to rip off Child’s Play, The Evil Dead and even The Princess Bride at the same time. I was right about Linnea Quigley’s breasts though. There’s something very comforting about Linnea Quigley’s breasts if you’ve watched a lot of low budget movies. They’re like a pneumatic pair of old friends that have done almost as much time in front of the camera as Quigley herself.
Linnea Quigley is an immensely likeable screen presence even if her acting skills were still somewhat rudimentary in 1987. It’s a good job she’s a likeable screen presence because the 5’2″ inch actress is excruciatingly miscast as a soldier gone AWOL from World War 3 in the amazingly futuristic 1998. The other female lead, Ashlyn Gere, is similarly miscast. Gere is another B-movie stalwart and sometime porn actress who has appeared in many films (including the brilliantly named Evil Laugh from 1987) but also appeared in more high profile movies as a body double for Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct and Demi Moore in Indecent Proposal. Like Quigley she is a little too slender to really sell the idea that she’s an infantry grunt in a harrowing future war.
The men fare a little better, the body type of a professional killer being closer to our society’s ideal of masculine beauty than feminine beauty, something that tells you everything you need to know why we as a civilisation are doomed. Ken Abraham, an anonymous jobbing actor, brings a sense of daytime television to the male lead, while the role of the younger and more obnoxious supporting male lead falls to Michael Aranda, a man who obviously felt that Bill Paxton’s work in Aliens was a little too nuanced to really play to the direct to video crowd. The plot of Creepozoids has the characters hide out from a storm of deadly acid rain in a complex that looks suspiciously like a cheap warehouse set. The complex turns out to have been a research facility which was working on creating some kind of genetic superhuman. Predictably someone involved in the basic calculations mixed up a six and a nine and instead of creating a superhuman they created a deadly murder bastard. Hi-jinks promptly ensue.
What surprises me most about Creepozoids is how much I enjoyed it. There’s an ebullience to the film that suggests everyone involved was having fun. While the action sequences are all directly referencing other films, director David DeCoteau (a Full Moon staple who got his start working for Roger Corman) has a lot of fun putting a different slant on things. If you thought that the main thing missing from the infamous dinner scene in Alien was that no one’s head sort of exploded then you’re in for a treat. If you’ve ever wanted to see the Rodents of Unusual Size sequence from The Princess Bride re-imagined as a horror vignette, then look no further. This is a film that’s happy to plunder from the best and then ignore everything that made them work.
The cast are giving it their all (which sadly isn’t as much of a compliment as it ought to be) and the special effects team manage to accomplish quite a lot on a budget that ought not to stretch much further than an episode of Blue Peter about creating a murder bastard out of an old bottle of fairy liquid and some double side sellotape. People who like their films well made and original ought probably to look elsewhere, but connoisseurs of micro-budget B movies may well find, like I did, that Creepozoids packs just enough charm into its slender 72 minutes to make it worthy of your time.
Creepozoids is available on Region 2 DVD now from 88 Films.