Night Of The Creeps Review (1986)

"The good news is your dates are here. The bad news is they're dead."

There are Horror movies that feel like midnight movie staples, and then there are Horror movies that are midnight staples carved right into your heart and soul. Night of the Creeps belongs to the latter. This one doesn’t just wink at you from the corner of the theater, it throws an arm around your shoulder, hands you a beer, and drags you into the chaos headfirst. It is brain slugs in your date’s head and a shotgun in your hand. Simply put it’s glorious!

First, you're hit with little alien potatoes in diapers chasing each other through a spaceship like its space kindergarten gone wrong. Then BAM, we’re in the 1950s, black-and-white style, and then we flash to a 1980s college campus, where two lovable loser protagonists decide the best way to get girls is by robbing a cryogenics lab. That’s right. The ultimate pickup line: “Hey baby, wanna see the corpse I accidentally defrosted and released an alien parasite from?”

From there, it’s an unholy fusion of Re-Animator energy and Return of the Living Dead aesthetics, and the desperate loneliness of a college freshman who just wanted a date to the dance but instead ends up in a full-blown zombie apocalypse. There are slugs. There are exploding heads. There’s a detective who makes Dirty Harry look like a mall cop who delivers every line like he’s trying to seduce Death itself.

Tom Atkins walks through the film like a trench coat-wearing fiend. He’s got PTSD, a bottle of whiskey, and absolutely zero time for nonsense. Every time he says something, it sounds like a rejected tagline from a 1970s revenge movie. And every time he shows up, you know someone is going to die, get burned alive, or have a worm come out of their face.

The practical effects are wet, the acting is Deliciously off-kilter, and the vibes are immaculate. There are sorority girls with flame throwers, zombie dogs and brain slugs that slither across the ground rampantly.

The best part is that somehow, beneath the blood, slime, and psychosis, this movie has HEART. Like, actual heart. You find yourself caring. How dare a film with alien slugs turning frat boys into meat puppets make me feel something?

Night of the Creeps is what happens when you hand a VHS tape to the devil, and he mails it back after watching The Thing, Evil Dead 2, and a teen rom-com all at once. It’s sweaty, sleazy, sweet, and stupid in the best possible way.

If you haven’t seen it yet fix your life.

Thrill me!