Night of the Creeps
Detective Cameron: I got good news and bad news girls. The good news is your dates are here.
Sorority Sister: What’s the bad news?
Detective Cameron: They’re dead.
And with that outrageously memorable quote, I will begin. This movie is probably, in my view, one of the best zombie/alien movie that I have ever seen and Tom Atkins would agree with me. This movie tells of an alien slug species the invade a small town back in the 50’s, and a pair of geeky college friends accidently release the original host of the life-forms after a fraternity prank went bad. Now, the aliens are loose and it’s up to the two unlikely friends and a cop with a bad past to save the college, and the world. What I enjoyed so much about his movie are three things: the acting, the excellent editing and the creature features, all of which made this move so memorable.
EDITING
Like the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, this movie effectively transitions from the 1950s to the present day 1980’s using a careful edit. The killer is about to kill the young woman when as soon as he brings the axe down it’s the year 1986. It’s this kind of technique that I love to see in horror movies, the concept of contrasting images that horror movie lack. If you pay attention to some of the action sequences, the two different shots match up perfectly so it doesn’t look like they are two different shots, they are practically seamless. It was an overall great use of juxtaposition.
ACTING
What I want to point out is that this movie, character wise, is a huge tribute to all the great horror directors just like Evil Ed is to Evil Dead. The character list is as follows: Christopher Romero, James Carpenter Hooper, Cynthia Cronenberg, Det. Ray Cameron, Det. Landis and Sgt. Raimi. There were great performances by Jason Lively (Romero), Jill Witlow (Cronenberg), Tom Atkins (Cameron) and Steve Marshall (Hooper). There were even great performances by supporting actors like Vic Polizos and Dave Alan Johnson. It’s these kinds of formulas that I love to see in horror movies, a great character tribute with great performances by the cast.
CREATURE FEATURES
As far as the special effects go in this movie, they were not all that bad, and for that time they were pretty decent. You can tell that the zombies that are about to be decapitated are pre-cut heads and the blood looks pretty fake, and the zombie cats and slugs look too much like puppets, but it’s these things that make the creature features all the more recognizable. The gore was pretty good and some of the decapitations and head blowings were pretty cool and there was a reasonable amount of blood and flaming zombie drones.
It’s easy to see where James Gunn got his idea for Slither; only in this movie it jumps from the 1950s to present day. It can even be inferred that the 50s portion of the movie is a tribute to the cheesy 50s b-grade horror movies the probably inspired the director. I would recommend this movie to anybody who loves horror movies, especially those who love either zombie flicks or alien farces. This movie effectively blends the two together with a careful technique of editing, acting and special effects. As for me, it would probably be one of my favorite horror / sci-fi’s that I have seen.
PS: Thank you DudeWithTheShotgun for the heads up.
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