- Written and directed by Fred Dekker
- Starring
- Jason Lively
- Steve Marshall
- Jill Whitlow
- Tom Atkins
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you — the quintessential B-movie.
A laundry list of features should prove sufficient to whet your appetites:
- midget aliens
- brain-eating alien slugs
- zombies
- a world-weary detective
- nerdy freshmen trying to get the attention of beautiful sorority girls, who are in turn going out with Nazi frat boys
- an axe-murderer
- Dick Miller
To put it all in a semblance of order for you:
We open with butt-ugly midget aliens having a rather violent dispute aboard their spaceship, with one of them managing to jettison some sort of experimental canister amidst laser fire.
The canister ends up crashlanding in 1959 America (shot in black and white), adjacent to the campus of Corman University (hee hee hee), where young lovers Johnny and Pam break off from their “parking” to explore. Johnny goes into the woods to find the canister and have an alien space slug fly into his mouth; Pam waits nervously in the car until an escaped mental patient with an axe cuts the evening short.
Fast forward to 1986, where freshmen Chris (Jason Lively, smack in the middle of his underperforming career) drifts around campus with his witty friend, double-crutch cripple J.C. (Steve Marshall). I learned in high school, while studying The Catcher in the Rye, that characters named “J.C.” usually die a martyr’s death. Whoops, hope that’s not too much of a spoiler. Chris is instantly smitten with sorority girl Cynthia Cronenberg (hee hee hee! — can’t wait to go home and meet dad!) (Jill Whitlow), but being a nervous freshman he can’t bring himself to talk to her, despite J.C.’s sarcastic prodding. No, instead he tries to take the circuitous route — pledging the Beta fraternity. Of course, the facts that a) they’re geeks and b) Beta president Brad is Cynthia’s boyfriend kinda doom the enterprise.
Nevertheless, they’re given a pledge assignment (furthering my thesis that ’80s’ teen movies are actually fantasy quest tales in disguise), to snatch a cadaver and deposit it on the steps of a rival frat. In search of such a thing, they sneak into the Med building, and accidentally luck into something else: A cryogenic chamber, complete with Johnny in a tank (the American version of Prince Albert in a can). It being the closest corpse at hand, they try to abscond with poor Johnny, but freak and run when his eyes open.
Johnny, obviously, is not terribly dead, and after killing a medical grad student and spitting a space slug into his mouth, goes on a stroll across campus, ending up at the window of the sorority house that used to be Pam’s — and is now Cynthia’s. Cynthia is treated to a view from her window of a smiling naked cadaver whose head splits open, spilling slugs into the shrubbery.
The ensuing police investigation of both the dead grad student and the ambulatory cadaver falls to Detective Cameron (Tom Atkins), world-weary and hard-boiled; he also happens to have been Patrolman Cameron, the ex-boyfriend of Pam who discovered her body after the axe murderer was finished with it — a fact that has haunted his life ever since.
It doesn’t take Cameron long to track down Chris and J.C., as both were identified by the Med Center night janitor — but since they obviously didn’t run from the building with the corpse under their arm, they’re turned loose. But not before Cameron scares Chris poopless by relating how he had long ago tracked down the psycho, blown him away, and buried him in a vacant lot which is now occupied by the sorority house mother’s cottage.
Now, let’s see — there’s a corpse under the building right next to where there was a big spill of slugs that like to reanimate the dead. What’s better than an axe murderer? A zombie axe murderer, naturally!
What ensues is just plain tons of mayhem, culminating in a busload of fratboys on the way to pick up their dates for the formal, crashing and dying to the man, then being reanimated and proceeding on their dates, with Cameron, Chris, and Cynthia defending the sorority house with a 12-gauge and a flamethrower. (Where’s J.C.? Remember what I said about martyr’s deaths?)
Now, I don’t know if I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it now: any movie whose climax involves blowing the heads off slug-infested frat boys is a winner in my book. And this movie wins in spades. There’s even a lawnmower scene which could very well have inspired Peter Jackson’s longer treatment of the subject in Dead Alive.
As B-movies go, this one is just about right. Nowhere is the expectedly truncated budget visible; in fact, between the alien ship interiors and the 1959 period recreation (complete with licensed music like “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” and “Put Your Head On My Shoulder”), we’re given the impression that there was plenty of money to go around. Writer/director Fred Dekker gives us a script chock-full of witticisms and in-jokes; in addition to the afore-mentioned Corman and Cronenberg references, we also have characters named Raimi and Landis (I haven’t seen so many referential names since Death Machine), not to mention a lengthy segment of Plan 9 From Outer Space on the house mother’s TV and a good cameo by Dick Miller.
With his directorial hat on, Dekker then presents said script in rare fashion, replete with comic-booky gore, engaging pacing, and just plain fun.
It’s sad, therefore, to look at Dekker’s career and discover just how someone this good seems to have vanished from the radar. He wrote the original story for House; made this wonderful movie; wrote and directed The Monster Squad (a well-meaning misfire); wrote the stories for a couple of movies that somehow no one really remembers, and directed some episodes of Tales From the Crypt; and capped off his career (so far) with his final misstep, writing and directing Robocop 3 (1993). Such are the vagaries of fate.
Yet, given the fact that someone like Albert Pyun will die with eleventy-billion films to his credit and not a single film worth watching twice, it doesn’t seem nearly so unfair that Fred Dekker will be able to etch on his tombstone: “I made Night of the Creeps.”
A conspicuous oops: As Chris and Cynthia are fighting the zombie frats, Cynthia is grabbed from behind and dragged away. She screams, “Brad! Brad! Brad!”, but given that Brad’s been dead for about ten minutes and she’s currently fighting side-by-side with Chris, she should probably be screaming, “Chris! Chris! Chris!”
Interesting Factoid: Apparently, all of the make-up technicians got to put on make-up and play frat zombies.
Some Notable Quotables:
“Johnny, can we go back to the Point now? I’ll even let you fondle my breast!”
- Pam, nervous about being left in the car alone
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God! Do you think it’s taking the Lord’s name in vain to say ‘oh my God’ a whole bunch of times really fast like that?”
- J.C. upon discovering Johnny-in-a-tank
“What is this, a homicide or a bad B-Movie?”
- Det. Cameron at the cryogenics lab
“Well, I got good news and bad news, girls. The good news is your dates are here.”
“What’s the bad news?”
“They’re dead.”- Det. Cameron and a sorority girl, giving us the source for the poster tagline
“I personally would rather have my brain invaded by creatures from space than pledge a fraternity.”
- J.C., laying the foreshadowing on with a trowel
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: roughly 32 (what, like I’m gonna stop and count frat boys?), plus one cat and one dog
- breasts: 4
- explosions: 3
- dream sequences: 1
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- spring-loaded cats: 1
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 4
- David Oliver (Steve, the unibrowed jock) played “Young Man” (what a role) in the TNG 5th season episode “Cost of Living”
- Lori Lively (Lori, one of the sorority girls) was “Siana” in the DS9 7th season “Shadows and Symbols (she also was in Free Enterprise, which almost counts)
- Todd Bryant (credited as “Informative Student”) was Klingon Captain Klaa in Star Trek 5 (and Star Trek 6, but you have to look fast to catch him)
- Dick Miller (the police armorer) was “Vin” in the DS9 3rd-season two-parter “Past Tense” and the vendor in the TNG 1st-season episode “The Big Goodbye”
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