Night of the Creeps (1986)

Finally, a nice little B-flick that relishes being exactly that…a B-movie. “Night of the Creeps” is a little film that’s generally regarded with high praise from the horror community, and with good reason. Director Fred Dekker pays obvious homage to the cheapie sci-fi flicks of the 50’s with obvious relish. Case in point, the local college is called none other than “Corman University”, and the film is laced with tons of little winks to the genre throughout, all without being condescending.

Seems back in 59’ a container carrying a top-secret alien experiment landed on planet earth. The experiment itself is a batch of slugs that pop into ones mouth and incubate in the brain till more are ready to hatch, all the while turning the host into a bloodthirsty zombie…of course. Pop ahead to 1986, where two campus nerds are trying out for the local “cool” fraternity, the infamous “Betas”. Their initiation process requires them to steal a corpse and place it on a rival frat house’s front porch. Unluckily for our boy’s however, the body they choose to steal from the local cryogenics lab (ha ha) is none other than a slug-infested body that’s been on ice since the incident in 59’. Body thaws, body zombies around for a while, then body explodes with fresh alien slugs…all headed to the local college campus. It’s now up to our two nerds and a drunken police chief with ties to the 59’ incident to stop the invasion by any means necessary.

The nice thing about this one is while even though it is a B-movie, it doesn’t seem to mind. It’s almost like it’s saying “I’m a movie about alien slugs…and proud of it!” The f/x is nice and gooey, the actors do well with their roles, and everything moves at a nice clip. Watch for the scene where a busload of leech infested frat boy’s show up to pick up their dates…good fun there. The only drawback was the sophomoric humor that was never really funny, but hey, I appreciated the effort. Worth a rental if you come across it, as it’s no doubt the best “alien slugs invade earth” movie ever made.