NIGHT OF THE CREEPS By John Rose

#10: The Mad Doctor

So it's the fourth day of The MonsterGrrls' Thir13en For Halloween, and today we're taking a look at a rather fun little movie from 1986, Night Of The Creeps, directed by Fred Dekker, the same man who made the now-hallowed movie The Monster Squad.  Combining a bit of alien invasion with zombie movies, NOTC is the E.C. Comic to MS's Famous Monsters Of Filmland.

In this case, dead people aren't cool

Opening in 1958, NOTC starts with two aliens trying to stop the release of an experiment, which fails and lands on Earth.  A couple on a date investigate, and the boy becomes the recipient of the experiment--a small slug-like alien creature.  Twenty years later, would-be frat pledges Chris (Jason Lively), a lovelorn sort who hopes to find a love connection with down-to-earth sorority girl Cynthia (Jill Whitlow), and his disabled but supportive buddy J.C. (Steve Marshall) are given the task of finding a cadaver to place on the steps of a sorority house.  Chris and J.C. find one in a secret room of the local cryogenics lab (which is de rigeur for all colleges, natch), and it just happens to be the corpse of the Boy Who Swallowed The Slug From 1958... which tries to grab them.  Things go mightily awry from there, and when the corpse manages to make its way to the sorority house and release its payload of amassed slugs, supernatural highjinks are bound to ensue.

A view to a thrill

From there, the movie becomes a rip-roaring, rollicking tribute to old-fashioned B-horror movies that mixes lost love, new love, film-noirish attitude (courtesy of Tom Atkins, whose heavy-drinking police detective character is a hard-as-nails Broderick Crawford acolyte), zombie apocalyptics, sexy college girls and flamethrowers

Sorority girls, zombies, shotguns and flamethrowers:  what's not to love?

into a fantastic gore-flecked stew that is lovely to behold.  NOTC is available on both DVD and Blu-Ray, and of course we at the Monster Shop had to have it for our collected archive.  Horror nerds will enjoy picking out the names of their favorite horror directors throughout the film, as every character in the movie is named for a noted horror director.  Plus, the action takes place in and around Corman University, after B-movie king Roger Corman.

The return of this film to availability on DVD makes it a wonderful Halloween treat, and an even better double feature when paired with The Monster Squad.  Get them both and have your own Double-Dekker Movie Night for Halloween.

Join us tomorrow on The MonsterGrrls' Thir13en For Halloween, and don't worry about what's standing behind you... it's probably just reading the blog over your shoulder.  Of course, I could be very wrong...