As I’ve mentioned far, far too many times already, the 1980s were the golden years of horror when it came to the cinema. The state of special effects and make-up advanced to such a point that you could get some pretty amazing looking stuff for relatively little cost, which coincided with a more relaxed, gore-friendly audience, but more importantly, filmmakers were able to have fun with it. Comedy and horror goes as far back as the Abbott & Costello films of course, but what I mean is that the genre had been around long enough that deconstruction and satirization of horror was possible. When people are taking the time to dig into the formula and tropes of your genre, then you know you’ve hit the big time.
If you’ve followed my Marathon series in the past, then you might recognize the name Fred Dekker from Monster Squad, a fun little film wherein a rambunctious Goonies-style group of kids fight against Golden Age era monsters. He was also involved in the Tales From the Crypt TV show, which was good, Robocop 3, which was crap, and Star Trek: Enterprise, which was meh, so he doesn’t have the most pristine of track records. Still, to make even one good movie is a feat in and of itself, and in the 80s Dekker managed to distill his personal flair for the more comedic side of horror into three films, spread out over 1986 and ‘87: Monster Squad (which I mentioned above), House (not based on the Japanese film, unfortunately) and Night of the Creeps. As Dekker is only credited as a writer for House, I decided to take a look at the latter in order to get a more complete picture of Dekker’s creative vision. Plus it was really convenient, so yeah, it gets a spot.
As far as plots go, Night of the Creeps follow the example of its influences by not complicating things too much. In 1959 a device containing an alien parasite crash lands on Earth. The leech-like parasite enters the human body through the mouth and lays eggs in the brain, which ultimately leaves the victim a zombie with very high head explosion potential. Hidden away in its first victim, who just so happens to be in cryogenic stasis in a science lab in the exact same college town it landed in 30 years ago, the parasites are accidentally set loose upon the unsuspecting world by students Chris and J.C. in a hazing ritual gone awry. Now it’s up to Chris and Detective Cameron (played by Tom Atkins, who also starred in oft-forgotten B-movie Halloween III:Season of the Witch) to unravel the mystery of these seemingly random deaths and eventually try and save the human race from these creeps. As James Cameron’s Aliens would say, it’s time for a bug hunt.
Aside from the glaring plothole of how and why the parasite’s first victim has been cryogenically frozen in a college science lab, as even one of those old B-movies Dekker is homaging would have given at least a few lines about it, Night of the Creeps is a enjoyably campy, delightfully gory movie in the vein of such films as Return of the Living Dead and The Stuff. I hesitate to call it good, just as in those old movies the most enjoyment you get out of this one is in the last 20 minutes or so, but those last 30 minutes are fucking amazing. That and there’s just this ever-so-slight undercurrent of cartoonish absurdity that heightens things in just the right places. The Fallout-esque parody of the 50s at the beginning of the film, Detective Cameron’s obsession with film noir and pulp mysteries, Dekker isn’t getting as jokey here as he would be in Monster Squad but you can definitely tell his tongue has touched his cheek here. Oh, and seeing obviously fake heads getting blown up by gunfire is always a treat.
Of the two Dekker directed films I’ve seen I have to side with Monster Squad, but Night of the Creeps was also a pretty fun. Classic ‘Movie Night With Friends’ material I think, especially if you make it a double feature with James Gunn’s Slither, which takes the basic premise of NotC and tosses in a little bit of The Thing for flavor. Just don’t scream too loudly, you probably don’t want to keep your mouth open for too long.
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