Up the Creep

Alien slugs arrive on Earth and get into people's mouths, turning them into zombies.
If you're think I'm talking about the new movie, Slither, then you're wrong.
I'm talking about Night of the Creeps, a forgotten movie from the 1980's golden age of crappy horror movies.
Creeps is a movie that seems to be a homage to every horror B-movie made in the postwar nuclear age of the 1950's and 1960's, which was when writer-director Fred Dekker grew up.
The movie starts on an alien spaceship in which two alien guards are chasing a fellow alien through the belly of the ship. The aliens are short, pale-pink and wrinkled. Imagina Mini-Me after being in a pool all day. The renegade alien puts a small capsule in the escape hatch and lets it fly through the air.
Cut to Corman University in anytown, U.S.A. The spaceship scene is in color. The college prologue is in black and white. Two college lovebirds go out parking. A young patrol police officer comes along and tells them to return to their homes. Their is an escaped lunatic with an axe on the loose. The cop and the co-ed dated while in high school. But then, they spot the escape capsule flying through the air.
The college boy wants to go investigate and finds the capsule in the woods while the co-ed sits in a convertible car on the side of a deserted road, listening to radio reports of the escaped lunatic. Wouldn't you know it? The college boy can't rush back to comfort his date, because the capsule opens and a long, black slug flies out and shoots down his throat. The co-ed's luck isn't any better. The lunatic approaches her and hacks her to pieces.
Flash forward a generation to pledge week at Corman University. Two first year students Chris Romero (Jason Lively from National Lampoon's European Vacation and the worst Rusty Griswald of the bunch) and J.C. Hooper (Steve Marshall), who walks on crutches, are attending the fraternity festivities, when Chris spots Cynthia Cronenberg (Jill Whitlow) and is smitten. And why not? Cynthia is the all-American girl. To impress her, Chris decides to join a fraternity. But a fraternity president Brad (Allan Kayser who had a recurring role on Mama's Family) or the Bradster as he likes to be called, see him and J.C. for two nerds and sets them out on an impossible task. They are to report to the medical school building, stel and then dump a cadaver in front of a rival fraternity's house.
However, Chris and J.C. stumble upon a secret labatory, which looks like something left over from an Ed Wood movie, where the college boy from the prologue is cryogenically frozen. Curious, they fumble around with switches and free him. Scared, they leave the building and return to their dorm, hoping that no one saw them. The frozen college student comes alive, somewhat, and shoots a slug from his mouth, into that of a med student played by David Paymer (Academy Award nominee for Mr. Saturday Night.)
In comes police detective Ray Cameron (Tom Atkins from John Carpenter's movies, The Fog and Escape from New York) to investigate the dead body of the med student, the break-in at the lab, and the disappearance of a once frozen body. Cameron is not just any other detective. He was the young cop from the prologue. Even more interesting, he was the one who discovered his ex-girlfriend's mutaliated corpse and killed the lunatic.
Pretty soon, more dead bodies turn up around the college campus as people wonder what is going on. You see, the alien slugs are parasites that use brains to plant their eggs. Once the slugs are at full size, the zombies' heads more or less explode. Even worse, Cynthia's sorority house becomes a hotbed because a biology student is storing animals brains in the basement.
If you think I'm giving too much away, I'm not. Plot is not important. For that matter, neither is common sense. Cameron buried the lunatic's body in the backyard of Cynthia's sorority house where a small cottage has been erected for the house mother. Well, surely, the grading companing would have uncovered the body when starting the foundation. Anyway, it would have been impossible for a person with problems walking to even help carry a cadaver. And let's not forget that it would have been completely unsanitary for brains to be stored in a basement. But horror movies don't have to make sense.
All the major characters in Night of the Creeps share last name with famous horror directors. Speaking of Ed Wood, Plan 9 from Outer Space is playing on a TV screen during a scene where the lunatic zombie comes alive.
Dekker's seems more of less to have constructed a comedy rather than a horror movie. I don't know if he was a member of a fraternity or went to college, but he sure sticks it to the frat boys by having them turn up as mindless zombies during the movie's climax. The scenes involving the frat boys pose for pictures before a formal are a dead-on send-up.
The dialogue in the movie is classic. When the zombie frat boys attack the sorority house, Cameron tells the girls. "I got some good news and I got some bad news. The good news is your dates are here." "What's the bad news?" a girl asks. "They're dead," Cameron says. He also refers to Chris and J.C. as Spanky and Alfalfa.
Night of the Creeps came out in 1986 and fell quickly into obscurity. It's not out on DVD and video copies are hard to find. Occasionally, it pops up on late night cable TV. Every now and again, the Sci-Fi Channel, among others, will show the movie with it's original ending.
Spoiler alert: The ending of the movie has Cameron blowing up the sorority house to kill all the slugs. The theatrical version as the zombie poodle attacking Cynthia for a scare ending. Dekker's original ending has the charred body of Cameron walking toward a graveyard. His brain is infected with zombies and he collapses to the ground. His head splits open. The slugs rush out into the graveyard. While overhead, the spaceship, after thirty years of searching, appears in the sky.
Night of the Creeps is crap, but it's terrific crap. Years before Peter Jackson would have his hero fight zombies with a lawnmower in Dead-Alive (or Braindead, considering what country you're in), Chris revs up a rusty old mower to fight the zombies.
Many of the actors in Night of the Creeps didn't achieve stardom, except for Paymer. Suzanne Snyder, who played Anthony Michael Hall's girlfriend in Weird Science, which also starred Whitlow, would later star in another zombie movie, Return of the Living Dead Part II as well as the cult classic, Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Dick Miller from Gremlins pops up in a small scene as a police department armory officer. Dekker went on to direct The Monster Squad, a few Tales from the Crypt episode. and the lame RoboCop 3, and that was all she wrote on him as a director.
I've seen Night of the Creeps more than I'd like to admit. It's so bad, it's good to watch.