You have to hand it to director and writer Fred Dekker. Not only has he made some of the most straightforwardly entertaining films of the past forty years or so, but those films are – for many people – forever wedded to the 1980s, so forming part of people’s nostalgia for a decade when many of them were growing up and experiencing cinema for the first time. Even for those who didn’t see his films within the decade they were made (I never saw the film under discussion here until I was well into adulthood) the effect and the charm seems the same. Dekker might not have set out to set down the 80s for future audiences, but he captures something about them perfectly nonetheless, even when he was imagining a dystopian future, or a time in the past. Although his directorial work is sadly minimal, he has also worked on a number of seminal movies in the capacity of a writer, and he has a very distinguished style which is recognisable to this day. Night of the Creeps, which he did direct as well as write and which is about to receive a brand new Eureka! release, is a firm favourite with genre fans for good reason. It’s funny, it’s innovative and it’s immensely ambitious.
Night of the Creeps starts in the 1950s, when an alien skirmish taking place in the skies above Earth results in a mysterious capsule being jettisoned from the craft. It falls to Earth, where it soon threatens to interrupt the romantic pursuits of a group of white-bread young college students, two of whom see it land (and, being idiots, simply have to go and investigate). Oh, there’s a crazed axe murderer on the loose on the same evening; it never rains but it pours. After we see the worst happen with respect to both of these events, we cut to 1986. The weird, weird world of US college life is getting into full swing for that academic year, including the traditions of potential fraternity and sorority house inmates undertaking dangerous/stupid things as ‘pledges’ (seriously, America: why do you do it to yourselves?) Two outsiders, ‘dorks’ Chris (Jason Lively) and best friend J. C. (Steve Marshall) are doing their best to navigate through this new, potentially fraught social situation, as well as hankering after beautiful, probably inaccessible girls like Cynthia Cronenberg (Jill Whitlow). Sadly for them, it turns out that to get anywhere either socially or romantically, they’ll have to actually sign up for a pledge of their own – as set by a group of probable future Republican party candidates, who make it good and difficult. Their task? To break out a cryogenically frozen corpse from the local hospital.
As you might have guessed, this is no regular corpse. Nope – this guy has been preserved since that fateful night in the 50s when the guy in question, Johnny, fell foul of whatever the hell was in that capsule. As soon as Chris and J.C. open his pod, he seems to revive: obviously he’s been preserved as the authorities try to figure out what the hell happened to him, but the reanimated Johnny wanders out into the night, terrifies a few people – Chris and J.C. included – and then his head splits open, releasing a number of what can only be described as space slugs. Uh-oh. These odd goings-on soon demand the attention of the police, headed by the grizzled Detective Cameron (Tom Atkins), whom it later turns out has some personal issues tied up with this town. Whether this will help him or hinder him remains to be seen, but certainly hell is breaking loose: the space slugs are seeking new hosts, and when they find them, they zombify them.
“If you take it seriously, you just get depressed all the time, like you! Fuck you!”
Fred Dekker set out to cram as many B-movie cliches as he could into this film, and I’d say he was pretty successful at that: the film is very busy, moving at pace through a series of cinematic ideas both familiar and strange. The concept of aliens endangering the Earth was very well established, even a little old hat by this stage, but audiences would definitely have recognised the idea of something coming from beyond the stars which could render people mindless and dangerous. It’s just the mechanics of that process were, shall we say, different in ’86. Science fiction had shown people alien parasites, but never quite like this, and one of the strangest legacies of Night of the Creeps is that it kickstarted a minor space slug subgenre which culminated twenty years later with Slither (2006); the director of that film, James Gunn, reckoned he’s never seen Night of the Creeps, but if that’s true then it’s a bloody outlandish coincidence, as much as Slither’s a great film in its own right. The space slugs aren’t the be all and end all, though: this film is an unashamed love letter to horror and sci-fi in lots of different styles. In Night of the Creeps you can also see echoes of zombie horror, a couple of nods to Re-Animator (or at least I’d argue so; the cat and the dog in the film could easily have wandered out of Dr. West’s lab) and even a tip of the hat to the slasher subgenre, with our escaped lunatic with an axe cropping up not once but twice. This is also a very gory film in places, as you’d expect where parasites explode out of people’s heads and only shotguns or flames seem to knock the unwitting hosts back. I’m glad Dekker didn’t shoot the entire film in black and white as originally planned; we’d have lost a lot of the ‘ick’ factor, which is integral to the entertainment in a film which refuses to take itself seriously. And all of this in less than ninety minutes, which only makes me hanker for the days when filmmakers could routinely tell a story so economically.
Night of the Creeps also boasts what I think we can now call a classic Dekker script, somewhere between plausible and humane in places, obviously crafted in others, with catchphrases and black humour throughout. It’s a film where you can laugh at the exchanges between Chris and J.C, but also get a true sense of their friendship, right down to a genuine feeling of pity when they’re torn apart. Tom Atkins, one of the most recognisable and beloved figures in cult cinema, is at his best here (in what he’s termed his own favourite film which he appeared in). He’s such a vivid character, but again, when not camping it up and yelling “Thrill me!” down the telephone, the guy can really act. I think that’s it: up against these preposterous turns of events, all of the cast do such a great job, and lend a kind of deserved gravitas to their roles. Their respect for the subject matter makes the storytelling all the more entertaining. Sure, the end of the film (with this ending) tantalises for a sequel which never came, but Night of the Creeps is more than sufficient. As pure entertainment, I can’t fault it.
This upcoming release looks superb too, with a crisp cut and a great audio track. There are also some interesting extra features (more Tom Atkins can never be a bad thing) and, all in all, if you don’t yet have this film in your collection, this Blu-ray release is happily recommended.
Night of the Creeps will be released by Eureka! Entertainment on 8th October 2018.