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Movie A Day: Night of the Creeps
This may be one of those that only a few of you have seen but it seems like everytime I bring this one up in conversation a lot of people remember it.
Plot: a morbid alien experiment crash lands on earth in the fifties. When a hunky jock goes to investigate the crash site, he is immediately infected by the slugs residing at there. His girlfriend, left alone, is murdered by an escaped mental patient. Flash forward to the 80's, where two loser freshman try to rush a frat to gain the attention of a beautiful girl (played by the stunning Jill Whitley). The fraternity tells them to steal a cadaver from the medical college and leave it on the porch of a sorority. The freshman unwittingly set free a corpse that had been in suspended animation (the jock from the 50's who was infected by space slugs), who proceeds to infect people around campus. Enlisting the help of a bitter old detective (Tom Atkins, in his finest role ever), the freshmen must save a house full of sorority girls from an army of infected fratboys.
Whew, kind of a long plot, huh? That's what separates this movie from the rest of the standard low budget horror trash of the 80's. The movie was written by Fred Dekker, also responsible for that ultimate guilty pleasure The Monster Squad. What keeps me (and many other viewers - Night of the Creeps is a bona fide cult classic) intrigued by this movie is how much they did with it. Despite the cheesy premise and the budgetary constraints, they still managed to make this an honest tale of redemption. This is embodied in the character of Detective Cameron, who is the glue that holds this movie together.
I won't go so far as to say this is a perfect movie. There are a few plot holes that are too big to ignore and a few times in the movie you have to scratch your head at the characters' logic but the movie is so much fun that these are very minor issues. Despite the low budget, the effects are surprisingly effective.
This is also one of the first films I can recall with multiple endings. If you watch the cable version you get the ending with the Detective, whereas the video ending has one with the zombie dog.
The performances all around were solid. Jill Whitley was very beautiful in that Daphne Zuniga-with-an-attitude kind of way but sadly she wouldn't do much more after this. Tom Atkins is steals every scene he's in and proves again to be one of the most reliable character actors around.
If you havent' seen this one, keep your eyes out for it on Cinemax and Sci-Fi, where it stays in regular rotation after all these years. Unfortunately, the DVD rights are being held up and bootleg copies go for about $40 online.
One of my all-time faves.
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The Lonely Ones - available on DVD at all online retailers and Fry's Electronics everywhere! Check out the film's MySpace page for reviews and interviews with the cast and crew!
Last edited by mdamien13; September 9th, 2003 at 10:10 AM.
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