Night of the Creeps (1986)

 

"The good news is: your dates are here. The bad news? They're dead."

This flick is awesome. 

Writer/director Fred Dekker set out to pay homage to old school horror and he wrote this little film that not only succeeds in delighting horrorfans with all the references, but also works as an entertaining horrorfilm for those looking for creepy thrills. That it is also funny is just the bloody icing on the cake.

Oh, and the dialogue? Quotable to a T. In fact, many a line resonates within anyone who has a love for horror. 

The film wastes no time in setting the tone, when on board a spaceship some bizarre aliens are chasing one another. One ejects a canister of some sort of experiment and this lands in 1957. It is discovered by a teenager who gets infected, but at the same time his girlfriend is chopped to pieces by an escaped maniac with an axe.

Talk about an opening sequence!

Then fast forward to 1986. Two friends, Chris and JC, are something of outsiders on college campus. Not the popular guys and as they themselves describe it "geeks and lame-oids". When Chris sees Cynthia he is instantly smitten, but she is currently the girlfriend of one of the Betas, a fraternity of jocks and douchebags. Because the power of boners compels him, he and JC want to join the Betas so Chris can talk to Cynthia. For a prank, they are tasked with finding a corpse and dropping it off in front of another house. 

Both guys find a frozen corpse, but it turns out to not be quite dead. 

If you figured this is the same guy as back in 1957: congratulations. 

The alien slugs that make the corpse move escape, and then the campus/town/dead are slowly infected. In comes detective Cameron (Atkins) to add his cynical swagger to the proceedings. And things just go wonderfully insane from there, as our intrepid leads attempt to stave off the alien/zombie invasion (of sorts).

The idea is so simple, yet the execution so wonderful. The actors are all having a blast, with special mention for Tom Atkins, who is swinging for the fences and who has probably the best catchphrase with "Thrill me." Just when you think that things might get teenage clichéd, Dekker flips it around and jolts the viewers back to full attention. The special effects are also really nice and gooey, with plenty of zombie carnage, alien slugs slithering across the screen and heads bursting open. It's glorious. 

Oh, and every character has a surname that is also the surname of a horror director, so you get Carpenter, Raimi, Romero, Dante and so forth. Not only that, but I'm pretty confident James Gunn took inspiration from this film for his alien slugs in the criminally underrated 'Slither'. 

A laugh, a scare, excellent gore and witty dialogue: what more do you need for an entertaining evening? So pop this one in and enjoy!