Director Fred Dekker on His Restored '80s B-Horror Gem Night of the Creeps

Exhausted the classic canon? Fed up with the current cinema of remakes, reboots and reimaginings? This week The Cold Case talks to filmmaker Fred Dekker, exhuming a recently restored cult-horror gem just in time for Halloween.

While the 1980s horror pantheon is rightly filled with Things, Poltergeists and Freddy Kruegers, the decade also spawned an awesome sub-strata of sublime B-movie genre efforts. Some, such as Screamplay and The Hidden we've already shone light on, but one unheralded schlock classic has remained in the shadows -- its VHS copies revered, TV screenings relentlessly tracked -- since it fleetingly flickered across silver screens in 1986. Until this week, that is, when, in no small part thanks to an Internet petition, Night Of The Creeps, a comic-horror sci-fi tribute to all things alien (and zombie) finally makes it debut on DVD and Blu-ray.

Written and directed by Fred Dekker, this is 1980s cult at its cultiest. Nothing if not ambitious, the flick opens in 1959 -- year of its auteur's birth -- with a double prologue. First we see aliens aboard a spaceship trying desperately to stop something from ejecting. Next, we observe American teens discussing the latest flick -- that year's Ed Wood masterpiece Plan 9 From Outer Space -- before dealing with a comet that lands nearby, unleashing... well, stuff.

Cut to color and it's Pledge Week '86, where Chris and J.C., modern teen nerds, plot to woo hottie Cynthia away from jock lunkhead Brad. To do so means getting cool, and getting cool means following Brad's orders for a Frat prank initiation that involves retrieving a corpse. It just so happens the body they find is in a basement lab, having been cryogenically frozen since the gruesome slug-and-ax-maniac events of the film's introductory sequence. Before you can say Romero-Cronenberg-Raimi-Carpenter-Hooper -- which our characters do a lot, as all of the surnames of these New Corman University students reference famous genre directors -- there's an outbreak of killer zombies, who, when you shoot them in the head, unleash a torrent of zombie-making parasites.

Night Of The Creeps is tongue in cheek (and often slug in mouth) in its riffs on the greats of the genre, such as Night Of The Living Dead, and less-recalled 1950s fodder like The Tingler and It Came From Outer Space. But our teen motormouths (played by Jason Lively and Steve Marshall) are from the John Hughes species; they share a geeky chemistry and even an emotional moment after the latter succumbs in a terrific toilet scene. ("I don't have a pulse or a heartbeat -- I think I'm dead," he says in an unexpectedly touching farewell recording to his best pal.) The best fun, though, is had by Tom Atkins (whom you may remember from Carpenter's Escape From New York and The Fog) as Ray Cameron, the comically suicidal detective who's been on the trail of this extraterrestrial evil ever since his ex-girlfriend was chopped up back in '59, when he was but a rebuffed beat cop. His catchphrase "Thrill me" is good, but it's his delivery of three lines in particular that sealed his place in '80s B-history:

Fred Dekker, whose screenplay House was developed into a minor horror-comedy hit that same year, made Night Of The Creeps as his directing debut. But even budgeted at $5 million, the movie didn't make its money back. The same fate awaited his follow-up, 1987's similarly revered though more widely seen Monster Squad.

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