Ashlynn Gere

(In French, On Cable TV, June 2022) If I asked you to picture a low-budget 1980s monster movie set in a post-apocalyptic research facility, chances are really good that you’ll end up imagining something much like Creepozoids. This isn’t a badge of quality as much as an assurance of obviousness: the film seldom deviates from the easiest, most conventional path. The paper-thin plot has a bunch of WW3 survivors finding shelter from acid rain in an intact research facility. But that’s really just an excuse for gathering a bunch of disposable characters together in an enclosed set for one shower scene, and a bunch of death sequences. The violence escalates along with the gooey special effects, as our characters run down the same corridor set multiple times. Not much of it has any internal consistency or credible drama – the narrative logic of the film is to rip everything off from Alien, without caring much about whether it’s justified in-between the deaths. The staging is terrible and the shrieks make no sense (boy, that giant rat sequence!), but what else could we be asking for? Noted VHS-era pornstar (and occasional mainstream guest) Ashlyn Gere shows up in a minor role – or rather: as minor as a film with six actors can have. First-time writer-director David DeCoteau would go on to have a long and too-prolific career as a purveyor of low-budget schlock. Creepozoids is terrible no matter how you look at it, but if it has one saving grace, it’s being almost exactly what we imagine a bad Sci-Fi horror film from the late 1987s to feel like. If you’re so intent on being a cinephile to experience the worst alongside the best…