Review by Ben Bussey
Ah… herein lies a tale. A few years back, when I met my esteemed BAH colleague Keri O’Shea for the first time in a face-to-face/actual human interaction capacity, the conversation perhaps unsurprisingly veered to our favourite horror movies. As memory serves, I waxed lyrical about The Monster Squad, and how my pre-teen obsession with that film sparked a love for the classic monsters which remains to this day, not to mention how it inspired my lingering enthusiasm for 80s horror movies with often bewilderingly similar titles: Night of the Creeps, Night of the Demons, Demons… then Keri mentioned The Creeps. I had to admit I wasn’t familiar with that particular movie, but from the title alone it seemed to be in-keeping with the theme. When Keri proceeded to inform me it featured Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolfman and the Mummy reborn as dwarfs… well, I knew I had to see it.
And, in the years since, I have never quite forgiven Keri for this.
Okay, that might be a somewhat harsh reaction to something as (pun intended) slight as this film. The problem isn’t that The Creeps is extraordinarily silly; that’s obviously a given. It’s not the low production value; that’s also a given, particularly when you learn this is a Charles Band movie. It’s not that it contains rather un-PC elements which, dependent on your point of view, might be considered a tad bit offensive; once again, that’s pretty much a given, and honestly, anyone who finds themselves truly offended by this movie needs to reassess their priorities.
The main problem with The Creeps is simply this: it’s boring. It takes a central conceit which had the potential to be great for shits-and-giggles, and squanders it on a tedious, half-baked potboiler that feels like it was sketched out over the course of an evening; a film that’s so light on action, so crudely shot and edited, and so heavy on extraneous dialogue that it manages to feel slow and overlong even at barely 70 minutes in length.
That was how I felt on first viewing, anyway – so it was with some trepidation that I approached this new DVD edition from 88 Films (and I must note, not for the first time, my dislike of them calling it their ‘Grindhouse’ collection – as a straight to video release from 1997, The Creeps is nothing of the sort, and much the same is true of pretty much all the Full Moon titles which 88 Films have released under this heading). On revisiting The Creeps, I can honestly say that most of my intial assessment rings true – but at the same time, I can’t deny that this silly, cheap, trashy little movie is not without its charm, and – believe it or not – it does touch on some quite interesting ideas.
You see, the central macguffin which creates these miniature monsters is a machine they call an ‘archetype generator,’ built by mad scientist Bill Moynihan. The typical put-upon nerd, he wants to create his own monsters to take revenge on anyone that ever pantsed him in the hallway or hung a ‘kick me’ sign on his back, and to this end he steals rare original manuscripts of the classic horror novels to bring forth the beasts of fantasy into reality. (What’s that you say? The Wolfman and The Mummy weren’t based on 19th century novels? Shush now.) However, librarian Anna (Rhonda Griffin) gets wise to his nefarious plan with the help of bumbling amateur private eye David (Justin Lauer), and together they manage to remove the manuscripts from the machine just in the nick of time – hence, because the process did not complete, the monsters wound up only half-size.
Yes, it’s a funny idea. It’s just a shame that it takes an often painfully slow and unfunny thirty minutes for The Creeps to reach this point. Nor do things get moving too steadily from that point, as Phi Fondacaro’s Dracula is quite given to long and pondersome monologues too. The only real effort to spice things up comes when it transpires that, to complete the ritual and reach full size, the monsters need a human sacrifice – preferably a naked young woman.
Here’s where it gets particularly un-PC, as we ultimately see the little monsters tie a woman down to a table, strip her naked and fondle her while, bound and gagged, she screams… and the MPAA gave this a PG-13 on release. That is mind-boggling. No, it’s not quite on a par with Re-Animator’s head scene, but it’s clearly not a sight for pre-teen eyes. It does seem a bit much that the BBFC felt necessary to slap the film with an 18, as beyond this scene it’s pretty mild stuff, but given the BBFC’s stance on sexual violence I’m not in the least surprised. (In any case, the 18 certificate is more than warranted by the utterly unrelated bonus film 88 Films have slapped on the DVD – a vintage trailer compiltion entitled The Best of Sex and Violence, hosted by an endearingly droll and aged John Carradine.)
In all seriousness, though, the archetype generator is a nice idea, and it does lead to some quite heart-warming dialogue on what it is to be a legend; how a figure of the imagination can live forever. Whether anyone picks up a film of this nature looking for philosophical diversion is another matter, though. Anyway you look at it The Creeps is a let-down, far too small-scale (again, pun intended) to reach the kind of trashy heights it might have with so wonderfully oddball a premise. But if you’ve got a liking for that very particular Full Moon brand of low-brow, low-budget entertainment, there are worse ways to waste a little time.
The Creeps is available now on Region 2 DVD from 88 Films.