ABCs of Horror 2: 'N' Is for 'Night of the Creeps' (1986) -- Alien slugs create an army of frat boy zombies in this gory, underrated 1980s creeper. horror horrormovies halloween
a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor last year’s first ABCs of Horror project. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?
Some horror films possess a strain of what might be best described as embarrassment or self-loathing for their more puerile elements; a sheepishness against the perception of horror cinema as tacky garbage, inserted willingly or unknowingly by a filmmaker who perhaps believes he’s better than the material he’s working with. It’s an apologetic sort of quality, which seems to say “I’ll stoop to this level if it’s what you want to see, but I’ll take no ownership of this silliness.
All of this is made gloriously and bizarrely apparent by the film’s opening moments, which drop us with no context whatsoever into the steam-spouting corridors of an alien spacecraft, in which a squad of nude, pint-sized aliens who look like mutated Pillsbury Dough-Men are engaged in a firefight with one of their own, who jettisons a tube of hazardous material toward Earth. The film, simply using the sequence to immediately wake up its audience and set events in motion.
Our actual protagonists, meanwhile, are a pair of collegiate geeks who feel as if they’ve been culled from the roster of any given “college movie” of the postera—they’re too lame to join the frats full of preppy, rich assholes, and they pine after the sweet young damsel they meet on the first day, who is obviously already dating the Grand High Douchebag of the douchiest frat in town, with his platinum blonde hair and casual cruelty.
All these elements coalesce into a film that feels like a living embodiment of what people now picture when given the prompt of “1980s zombie movie.” Faces are peeled. Heads explode. Slugs are incinerated. Breasts are bared. Every imaginable horror director has his name invoked in tribute, no matter how ridiculous it sounds on screen. From “Cynthia Cronenberg,” to “Sgt. Raimi,” to “Officer Bava,” they’re all here.
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