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.
"It was released worldwide but it didn't really take off," Dekker told me last week of Night Of The Creeps. "It was an incredibly strange film, tonally it was all over the place. The original ending was a lot spookier. Unfortunately, we showed it to the studio and they got very confused." This week's release sees his original, darker finale restored and a bunch of extras added, including cast interviews and a look at how the simple but practical alien-slug effects were achieved.
Despite Creeps' failure at the box office, it, like Monster Squad, eventually gained an ardent following. "It found a few people who appreciated it, but it wasn't a mainstream success," said Dekker. "Over the years, through home video and cable and late-night TV, people started to gravitate toward it."
Dekker's influences were the modern masters of horror, religiously name checked, but he also sought inspiration from the mid-century movies he'd watched growing up with his dad. "I was always very comfortable and conversant with older movies -- if it was black and white, that was fine with me, maybe even better," he said. "So, yeah, my misspent youth is reflected in the film."
And of B-creature features, he reserves a special place in his heart for Plan 9, which isn't just name checked, but which appears on TV screens in Creeps. "It was one of those movies where I would get up in the middle of the night at college -- or, more likely, was still up, having not gone to sleep -- and I'd watch it at 2 or 3 in the morning," he recalled. "I loved it, it's just hilarious. And there's a particularly cheesy moment where one of the aliens is talking about these electro-guns which bring the dead back to life, and he crosses his arms just so. And I'd think, 'Wow, this is a gay actor from the San Fernando Valley, not some alien. I have to use that moment in my movie.'"
Creeps and Monster Squad's theatrical underperformance put a huge dent in a promising career. "The fact of the matter is that Hollywood is very mercenary," Dekker said. "Whether your movies are good or bad, if they make money, then they let you keep making them up. If they don't make money, you find you have a slightly harder route." Dekker did get to direct Robocop 3 later on, which made its money back, but it was "so universally loathed it kind of tainted me."
Dekker makes no secret of the fact that it's a frustrating state of affairs. "Oh God, yes," he laughed. "If you're a painter or a novelist, then you've got yourself, but when you're a filmmaker, you need other people, and money and resources, to make movies. So, it's been frustrating -- thanks for asking."
Sorry, Fred, but where from here? He's working, he said, on a drama completely removed from horror and comedy...but... but... if Night Of The Creeps 2 came a-calling, he'd be there. "The idea of a remake is ridiculous," he scoffed. "The original was already kinda a ripoff and remake, but I've always been interested in a low-budget sequel. Maybe if we sell enough DVDs and Blu-rays, it'll be possible."
To paraphrase Tom Atkins -- who's reportedly keen to be involved- - "Thrill us."
Michael Adams is the author of the upcoming comic memoir Showgirls, Teen Wolves, And Astro Zombies: A Film Critic's Year-Long Quest To Find And Watch The Worst Movie Ever Made (HarperCollins)