Face-Off: Night of the Creeps vs. The Monster Squad

An alien science experiment goes wrong, unleashing nightmarish parasitic slugs into small town America. Any creature, living or dead, human or animal, that these slugs manage to crawl into becomes a vehicle for these things, stumbling around while slug eggs incubate in the brain. When the eggs hatch, the host’s head explodes and more slugs come pouring out to repeat the process. Many of those infected by the slugs are your basic zombies, but there are some cool and unique ones, including a slug-zombie cat, a slug-zombie dog, and best of all, the rotten corpse of an axe-wielding maniac who has been dead for 27 years.

Jason Lively plays Chris Romero, a dorky college kid who pines for sorority girl Cynthia Cronenberg (Jill Whitlow), who is already taken by a stereotypical frat bro. The sweet Cynthia is more approachable than Chris expects, but he still manages to make things more complicated than necessary. As he pursues his dream girl, he’s aided by his dedicated best friend, Steve Marshall as James Carpenter Hooper. While Chris and Cynthia are adequate characters, J.C. is the heart of the film in some ways. When he’s removed from the proceedings it gives Chris the initiative to kick some slug zombie ass.

Tom Atkins steals the show as Detective Ray Cameron, a hard-boiled type who isn’t afraid to go rogue when the situation calls for it – like when his high school sweetheart is killed by an escaped lunatic. Cameron enjoys cigarettes and beer (specifically Miller), dreams of tropical getaways, and even has his own catchphrase: “Thrill me.”

NIGHT OF THE CREEPS unexpectedly begins with a chase sequence on a space ship that involves odd little aliens who have horrible aim. Brief action and horror beats throughout the running time then build up to a zombie assault on a sorority house where the walking slug factories are taken out with gunfire and flames. The climactic battle seems a bit quaint and slow when viewed thirty years later, but the characters get the job done, and in one very cool moment a lawnmower is put to unconventional use. Peter Jackson took this idea and cranked it up to 11 (and beyond) for DEAD-ALIVE.

It’s made clear in his films that Fred Dekker is a huge fan of horror, and CREEPS functions as a tribute to the sci-fi horror movies of his youth and many of the genre’s most influential directors, as you can see from the character names that have been listed and the many more that come up in the film (like Raimi, Corman, Cunningham, Miner, etc.) Dekker got to do it all with this film: space aliens, a black and white sequence set in the ’50s that combines a slasher urban legend with a BLOB-like meteorite, zombies, a detective story. He brought this mish-mash to the screen in a goofy, fun way.