The Eighth Night of Halloween

ON THE EIGHTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN I watched Night of the Creeps (1986), an attempted pastiche of 1950’s atomic horror creature features. In fact, it opens with a black-and-white flashback to the 1950's involving not only a pod full of mind-control slugs landing in the woods but also a teenager being attacked by an escaped ax-murderer while her boyfriend investigates said pod. The ax-murderer scene is one of many threads that are never picked up again, along with an undoubtedly expensive pre-credits shot where full rubber-suit aliens are fighting amongst themselves in their ship and eject the slugs to earth. There’s also the revelation that the infected boyfriend has been held in a cryogenic suspension lab until the movie’s present-day mid-80’s, when bumbling frat pledges release him. Why not just have the slugs land in a meteor and free up the resources spent on the aliens for more consequential plot points? Why not have the slug-controlled boyfriend murder the girl instead of the superfluous ax-murderer? Why not have him be infected and go on his rampage in the present, avoiding the need for the superfluous cryogenic suspension? 

On the other hand, all of these dead-ends would have been welcome if the movie had continued to drop in more zany sci fi chestnuts as callbacks, in a Joe Dante-esque spoof. But instead it grinds to a halt and pads out two-thirds of the runtime with dull campus melodrama involving characters that are both unsympathetic and incoherent. By the time it finally gets to the point in the last 15 minutes, when a hoard of slug-controlled frat boys lay siege to a sorority, it still hasn’t managed to establish any coherent stakes. Worse, despite how fun this climax might sound, it still manages to be sluggish (pun maybe intended, I guess) in the execution. Its one gracenote is Tom Atkins’ gamely hammy performance. 

I know this movie has a small cult following, and watching it after the unparalleled genius of Shivers, which makes the best possible decisions on all the same questions, does it no favors-- but “thrill me” (Atkins’ catchphrase) it did not.