Night of the Creeps (1986)
(On Cable TV, May 2020) While Night of the Creeps may not quite be among the very best 1980s blends of horror and comedy, it’s certainly in the top tier. It begins with an homage prologue to 1950s horror films before moving to “present day” 1980s and a sorority/fraternity party that turns ugly when parasitic alien slug-like creatures show up to transform everyone into zombies that then explode to birth more slugs. Whew. Everyone in this production, but none more than writer-director Fred Dekker and veteran character Tom Atkins, are treating this with the mixture of genre reverence and self-aware humour that the material deserves. The result is quite entertaining—sometimes funny, sometimes gross, but never too gross to erase the fun nor too comic to trivialize the horror. Clichés abound and many characters die, but the entire thing remains good fun all the way to the end. Night of the Creeps is more than worth a look if you’re going through 1980s horror and have already watched the big hitters of the decade.