Today's review is going to be a little bit different. I started watching Invaders from Mars last night and texted Zach (good friend to all) to let him know. He said he enjoyed it as a kid but thought Night of the Creeps was far scarier. Since I've never seen either, I looked up Night of the Creeps, and I realized that it was released less than two months later than Invaders. I have no idea what was going on in 1986 that made two different directors want to rip off Invasion of the Body Snatchers (beside the absolute moral and ethical decay of whatever it meant to be an American under the inscrutable reign of Ronald Reagan), but it happened. This follows in the proud tradition of other unrelated, but thematically similar films released around the same time: Armageddon and Deep Impact, Dante's Peak and Volcano, Star Wars and Laserblast.
So I decided it was my civic duty to watch both movies, and make this review a double-feature. That way we'll all know which one is better!
Spoiler alert: they're both bad!
So I decided it was my civic duty to watch both movies, and make this review a double-feature. That way we'll all know which one is better!
Spoiler alert: they're both bad!
Invaders from Mars (1986)
Tobe Hooper
"These things! They're huge, ugly, slimy, giant Mr. Potato Heads!"
Tobe Hooper (PBUH/RIP) is the godfather of bringing violent and gritty gore to horror films. The serious realism of Texas Chainsaw Massacre kicked off a new subgenre of American horror films and proved that Americans can be just as weird, perverted, and twisted as those wacky Italians.
While he never found the same level of mainstream critical success after Texas Chainsaw Massacre, he made some of my most beloved shlock horror films of the 1980's. In Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, he turned something terrifying and visceral into a bucket o' blood send up of 80's American culture. With Poltergeist, he developed a story with Steven Spielberg that still resonates today. I enjoy how half the film seems like a regular old Spielberg happy family in a weird situation (kinda like ET or Close Encounters), but then Tobe Hooper takes over and dunks them into an absolute hellscape. Everyone remembers that film for the "They're heeeeere" girl, but this is what I think of:
But his best film, in my opinion, is the one true masterpiece of the Golan & Globus Cannon collection: Lifeforce. It's a movie about sexy space vampires that are discovered asleep in a ship near Earth. They wake up, and very nakedly suck the life out of everyone they come in contact with. It's a huge (very expensive looking) production, has more nudity than a softcore Cinemax movie, and the special effects are fucking awesome:
Unfortunately it never got the respect it so rightly deserved and has become a forgotten classic (but maybe stay tuned for more about it?).
And as an aside, if you want a good excuse to never listen to Paul Scheer's awful "How Did This Get Made" podcast, he considers Lifeforce to be one of the top 5 worst movies ever made.
As you can tell, I'm giving a lot of praise to Mr. Hooper as an excuse to delay talking about Invaders from Mars. Don't get me wrong, I know what he was trying to do. It's clearly an effort to take a safe ET or Close Encounters type story, blend it with hokey 1950's science fiction, and add a small dose of that Tobe Hooper gruesome charm to make a shlocky, quirky, fun sci-fi horror adventure film for kids.
What they ended up with was a not-quite-for-kids-but-also-not-great-for-adults mess. Any kid older than 12 would just rather watch the brilliant remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and any kid younger would just want to watch ET. This movie exists in a no-man's land instead of doubling down and turning it into a hard R gorefest that puts a modern spin on the 50's alien invasion trope.
Before we (briefly) get into it, two things:
1) If you're curious, the whole thing is on YouTube for free. So if you're paining to see it out of some misplaced nostalgia or if you want to complete the Tobe Hooper filmography, knock yourself out.
2) To truly understand the insanity of Cannon films, I recommend you watch the excellent documentary Electric Boogaloo on Netflix. It's about two Israeli film producers (Golan and Globus) and their quest to create a movie studio on par with MGM or Universal. Basically, if you ever watched a VHS tape from a video store in the 80's or early 90's, you've seen a Cannon film. Golan and Globus had a balls out style of filmmaking, never afraid to spend money, and it really shows in all of the Tobe Hooper/Cannon collaborations.
Invaders from Mars starts by doing its very best Close Encounters impersonation: we have a delightful nuclear family enjoying each others' company and talking about science and space things. Dad works for NASA, mom is a stickler for the rules, and the child (David) is annoying beyond all reproach.
One night, following a meteor shower and lightning storm, David wakes up to a spaceship landing on the hill behind his house. He tells his parents who don't immediately dismiss his claims, and dad leaves the house to investigate. When he returns, David notices that he's...different, and now has an open sore on the back of his neck. I'm not sure how much more I have to say about the plot, because everybody's seen this story a dozen times by now, right?
Well, things in David's life devolve rather quickly. He goes to school, and instead of working to find a solution to the predicament that he (and frankly the rest of the non-conquered humans on earth) is in, he sits quietly in biology class, dissecting a frog (yes, exactly like in ET).
His teacher is Louise Fletcher, better known for playing Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, and is easily the best part about this movie by a country mile. I feel a little bad that she's forever typecast in these marmy, obsessed-with-control type roles, but hey, it's the part she was born to play. She's an excellent target for our derision and a clear foil to David.
Watch this clip until about 13:35
Skipping ahead, more people in the town start acting strangely and have sores on their necks (including Teacher Ratched, who immediately rises to the level of middle management in the alien takeover plot). David gets more and more desperate, but has help from the kindly school nurse, who allows herself to be dragged around by an annoying waif talking nonsense:
Watch until about 42:20
My drunken notes have "kind of a moron" for her character description. And with good cause!
David finds the secret entrance into the alien spaceship and does a bit of a tour. Here's where we are introduced to the fearsome beasts that are preparing to enslave humanity:
Watch until 39:35
No, you're not the only one thinking that they look like testicles worshiping a penis with a face.
After a lot of running around and shouting and being annoying, David and the school nurse convince the commander of the local military base (which is also where the NASA lab is located) that aliens have landed and are taking over. After some fact checking, the general is satisfied that the boy is telling the truth, and mobilizes the Marines stationed there to fight the invaders.
What follows is something you'd only see in a Cannon film: it appears that they hired an entire detachment of extras (or perhaps actual Marines) to drive around in real military equipment and carry lots of real-looking guns. This movie cost $12,000,000 to make in 1986. That's a healthy budget for a film in 2017!
The Marines storm the ship, and come face to face with the alien menace. Oh boy, this is what we've all been waiting for!
Watch until 1:13:15
Well, ok, the aliens are terrible and die like cattle.
For 20 more incomprehensible minutes, David and the Marines run around the alien ship, cavorting and capering. They line the ship with explosives, find their way back to the surface, and destroy the ship as it tries to take off. Once it's blasted to bits, the little alien mind control devices in all of the dominated humans spark and fall out, and David has his regular human parents back.
Or does he?
I was writhing with boredom by this point, and couldn't muster the energy to get mad when the movie ended with David waking up from a dream. That's right! It was all just a dream!
Or was it?
That's right! It was initially a dream, but when David goes to his parents' room, they're disgusting alien monsters (or something, because the movie doesn't show us...it's just an image of him screaming with alien noises in the background). The ol' double-switcheroo. What fun.
Ok, not great, but at least there's a scene where an Oscar winner eats a frog:
Night of the Creeps (1986)
While he never found the same level of mainstream critical success after Texas Chainsaw Massacre, he made some of my most beloved shlock horror films of the 1980's. In Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, he turned something terrifying and visceral into a bucket o' blood send up of 80's American culture. With Poltergeist, he developed a story with Steven Spielberg that still resonates today. I enjoy how half the film seems like a regular old Spielberg happy family in a weird situation (kinda like ET or Close Encounters), but then Tobe Hooper takes over and dunks them into an absolute hellscape. Everyone remembers that film for the "They're heeeeere" girl, but this is what I think of:
But his best film, in my opinion, is the one true masterpiece of the Golan & Globus Cannon collection: Lifeforce. It's a movie about sexy space vampires that are discovered asleep in a ship near Earth. They wake up, and very nakedly suck the life out of everyone they come in contact with. It's a huge (very expensive looking) production, has more nudity than a softcore Cinemax movie, and the special effects are fucking awesome:
Unfortunately it never got the respect it so rightly deserved and has become a forgotten classic (but maybe stay tuned for more about it?).
And as an aside, if you want a good excuse to never listen to Paul Scheer's awful "How Did This Get Made" podcast, he considers Lifeforce to be one of the top 5 worst movies ever made.
As you can tell, I'm giving a lot of praise to Mr. Hooper as an excuse to delay talking about Invaders from Mars. Don't get me wrong, I know what he was trying to do. It's clearly an effort to take a safe ET or Close Encounters type story, blend it with hokey 1950's science fiction, and add a small dose of that Tobe Hooper gruesome charm to make a shlocky, quirky, fun sci-fi horror adventure film for kids.
What they ended up with was a not-quite-for-kids-but-also-not-great-for-adults mess. Any kid older than 12 would just rather watch the brilliant remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and any kid younger would just want to watch ET. This movie exists in a no-man's land instead of doubling down and turning it into a hard R gorefest that puts a modern spin on the 50's alien invasion trope.
Before we (briefly) get into it, two things:
1) If you're curious, the whole thing is on YouTube for free. So if you're paining to see it out of some misplaced nostalgia or if you want to complete the Tobe Hooper filmography, knock yourself out.
2) To truly understand the insanity of Cannon films, I recommend you watch the excellent documentary Electric Boogaloo on Netflix. It's about two Israeli film producers (Golan and Globus) and their quest to create a movie studio on par with MGM or Universal. Basically, if you ever watched a VHS tape from a video store in the 80's or early 90's, you've seen a Cannon film. Golan and Globus had a balls out style of filmmaking, never afraid to spend money, and it really shows in all of the Tobe Hooper/Cannon collaborations.
Invaders from Mars starts by doing its very best Close Encounters impersonation: we have a delightful nuclear family enjoying each others' company and talking about science and space things. Dad works for NASA, mom is a stickler for the rules, and the child (David) is annoying beyond all reproach.
One night, following a meteor shower and lightning storm, David wakes up to a spaceship landing on the hill behind his house. He tells his parents who don't immediately dismiss his claims, and dad leaves the house to investigate. When he returns, David notices that he's...different, and now has an open sore on the back of his neck. I'm not sure how much more I have to say about the plot, because everybody's seen this story a dozen times by now, right?
Well, things in David's life devolve rather quickly. He goes to school, and instead of working to find a solution to the predicament that he (and frankly the rest of the non-conquered humans on earth) is in, he sits quietly in biology class, dissecting a frog (yes, exactly like in ET).
His teacher is Louise Fletcher, better known for playing Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, and is easily the best part about this movie by a country mile. I feel a little bad that she's forever typecast in these marmy, obsessed-with-control type roles, but hey, it's the part she was born to play. She's an excellent target for our derision and a clear foil to David.
Watch this clip until about 13:35
Skipping ahead, more people in the town start acting strangely and have sores on their necks (including Teacher Ratched, who immediately rises to the level of middle management in the alien takeover plot). David gets more and more desperate, but has help from the kindly school nurse, who allows herself to be dragged around by an annoying waif talking nonsense:
Watch until about 42:20
My drunken notes have "kind of a moron" for her character description. And with good cause!
David finds the secret entrance into the alien spaceship and does a bit of a tour. Here's where we are introduced to the fearsome beasts that are preparing to enslave humanity:
Watch until 39:35
No, you're not the only one thinking that they look like testicles worshiping a penis with a face.
After a lot of running around and shouting and being annoying, David and the school nurse convince the commander of the local military base (which is also where the NASA lab is located) that aliens have landed and are taking over. After some fact checking, the general is satisfied that the boy is telling the truth, and mobilizes the Marines stationed there to fight the invaders.
What follows is something you'd only see in a Cannon film: it appears that they hired an entire detachment of extras (or perhaps actual Marines) to drive around in real military equipment and carry lots of real-looking guns. This movie cost $12,000,000 to make in 1986. That's a healthy budget for a film in 2017!
The Marines storm the ship, and come face to face with the alien menace. Oh boy, this is what we've all been waiting for!
Watch until 1:13:15
Well, ok, the aliens are terrible and die like cattle.
For 20 more incomprehensible minutes, David and the Marines run around the alien ship, cavorting and capering. They line the ship with explosives, find their way back to the surface, and destroy the ship as it tries to take off. Once it's blasted to bits, the little alien mind control devices in all of the dominated humans spark and fall out, and David has his regular human parents back.
Or does he?
I was writhing with boredom by this point, and couldn't muster the energy to get mad when the movie ended with David waking up from a dream. That's right! It was all just a dream!
Or was it?
That's right! It was initially a dream, but when David goes to his parents' room, they're disgusting alien monsters (or something, because the movie doesn't show us...it's just an image of him screaming with alien noises in the background). The ol' double-switcheroo. What fun.
Ok, not great, but at least there's a scene where an Oscar winner eats a frog:
Night of the Creeps (1986)
Fred Dekker
"What is this? A homicide, or a bad B-movie?"
Remember in the previous review when I said, "[Invaders from Mars] exists in a no-man's land instead of doubling down and turning it into a hard R gorefest that puts a modern spin on the 50's alien invasion trope?" Well, I only meant that for Tobe Hooper, because Fred Dekker somehow fucked that exact thing up (well...almost. He was saved by one man).
Fred Dekker was an alien/horror savant in his own right, best known for writing the screenplay for Alien, one of the greatest films ever made. He also wrote and directed both Robocop 3 (the best of the Robocop sequels, if that means anything at all) and a personal favorite: Monster Squad (which is like if you mixed The Goonies with all of the Universal Monsters. The Wolfman having nards is only canon because of Monster Squad and Fred Dekker).
So it makes sense that a guy with such a passion for monsters, aliens, horror, and B-movies would make film like Night of the Creeps. It's also your standard "alien invasion turning people into shells of their former selves" story, but this one is way more on the nose with its comedy. For example, most of the characters in the film have something to do with horror/sci-fi creators: JC is "John Carpenter," there's a Sgt. Raimi, a Detective Landis, a Cameron, and the female love interest is named Cynthia Cronenberg. At one point, an old woman is watching Plan 9 From Outer Space on TV, and Dick Miller shows up for 30 seconds, just so that somebody can call him Walt. Dekker wants it to be absolutely crystal clear: YOU ARE WATCHING AN HOMAGE.
But there's something very special about Night of the Creeps, and that's Tom Fuckin' Atkins:
For the uninitiated, Tom Atkins is like a lesser, poorer, drunker Joe Don Baker, except that's what makes him so amazing. He was a mainstay in cheesy 80's horror, playing the drunken dad in Halloween 3, the drunken dad in Creepshow, the drunken cop in Maniac Cop, and now the drunken cop in Night of the Creeps. There's a theme with Tom Atkins' roles: he's never more than 20 seconds away from another sip of booze.
In fact, our introduction to him in Night of the Creeps is him, in a white suit, on a beach, being served a drink in a coconut (which I'm sure is just room temperature Miller High Life) by two bikini babes. This is the ultimate Tom Atkins fantasy, both in his roles and in his real life. He's the kind of guy who would watch a Spuds Mackenzie commercial and think, "I would love to crack a brew with that dog."
All right, I'm getting ahead of myself. The glory of Tom Atkins doesn't happen right away. We have to...ugh...get through some of the plot first.
We know the basic premise: alien takeover, but Dekker does something kind of cool with it. First we get a little snippet of some adorable aliens running around a spaceship. I guess it's supposed to look cool, but it just reads as a Rick and Morty gag, because the aliens appear to be fleshy naked Pillsbury doughboys with adorable butts.
Evidently one of them is trying to release an experiment, which naturally lands on earth. Cut to 1959 and sorority row of some fake college. Here we're introduced to a couple of fresh faced, clean cut, white, gentile youngsters who head up to makeout point for some necking. The girl has recently spurned a local police officer for some jock (this will only be important because the cop grows up to be Tom Atkins), and the boy is as nondescript as possible. While they're at makeout point, a meteor (the experiment flung from the spacecraft) lands nearby, and the boy drives the car to investigate. While he's poking around the woods looking for the impact spot, the girl hears a report on the radio of an escaped axe murderer from a mental asylum who is headed right toward her.
This is where Night of the Creeps sets itself apart: instead of focusing on just one tried and true trope, Dekker goes for broke. Now we have a young man with an alien slug in his mouth, and a homicidal axe murderer hacking up the young woman in the car. It's a good way to kick things off and keep the audience confused.
Now we flash to 1986, and things quickly go downhill. We're introduced to JC and Chris, two of the most annoying characters in all of film. I understand that they were supposed to be overplayed and hokey, but it gets tiring after about 30 seconds.
Chris pines after the beautiful sorority sister Cynthia Cronenberg, but knows that he'll need to get into a fraternity if he wants any chance with her. The boys are hopeless dweebs but decide to pledge the coolest frat on campus: Beta House, the frat with the best slogan in history.
My head canon is Beta House is populated entirely by the cuck failsons of deep state Reagan administration officials.
So a lot of boring, non-Tom Atkins related things happen until the boys are tasked by the leader of the frat to steal a dead body from the medical school morgue and deliver it to the steps of their rival frat. JC and Chris go to the medical building and find themselves in a room with the frozen body of the 1959 boy from the beginning of the film. JC moronically jams a bunch of buttons, and the body is released. The boys run away, but a poor lab technician gets infected with an alien slug. Now the aliens are loose and reproducing.
The coolest thing about the slugmen is that when they reach a certain point of gestation, their heads just sort of split open and send a bunch of space slugs scurrying around. This is where Detective Tom Atkins comes in, because as bodies start piling up around campus, everyone assumes that they've been axe murdered.
We learn that the young cop who was spurned by the young woman in 1959 was also the cop that first discovered the woman's dismembered corpse. So as more and more head-split bodies show up on campus, cops start assuming that the crazy axe murderer who disappeared in 1959 must be back for more chopping.
But Tom Atkins knows the horrible, booze-soaked truth:
So while everyone assumes the axe murderer is back, Detective Tom Atkins knows that he's dead and buried under the floorboards of what is now Cynthia's sorority house. Still, he's vexed by all of the alleged axe murdering that's going on, because how else could you explain it? The payoff to this sub-plot is the dessicated corpse of the axe murderer bursting through the floorboards of the sorority house mother's room, and Tom Atkins exploding its head with a shotgun, spilling space slugs everywhere.
You can tell where the plot is going from here on out, but the journey isn't terrible. Chris, Cynthia and Tom Atkins have to defend the sorority house from an army of brain-slug infected frat bros. This situation gives us the best line of the film by far:
There are some good kills here and there: Cynthia explodes a guy's head with a flame thrower, Tom Atkins exclaims "It's Miller Time" while he roasts one with a hairspray/cigarette flame thrower (seriously), and Chris uses a lawnmower to kill one of the bros (although it's pretty disappointing).
But nothing tops Tom Atkins going full...well, full Tom Atkins:
The climax of the film is Tom Atkins sacrificing himself by blowing up the basement of the sorority house where all of the brain slugs have collected for some reason. I'm guessing his corpse burned with a hot blue flame for at least 12 hours.
The final shot is Cynthia leaning down to pick up a small dog, who spits a brain slug directly at the camera as it cuts to credits. Because of course it does.
This is a pretty easy call. Neither is as amazing as the Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake, but Night of the Creeps has the edge. It's rated R, there's gratuitous 80's nudity, there's some gore, and there's lots of Tom Atkins.
Invaders from Mars is too much of a kid's flick to be gory, and too much of an adult flick to be funny. The whole thing ends up muddled and unsatisfying, even if it is kinda fun to watch Louise Fletcher's career die with a whimper.
If you're really fixing for a good Body Snatchers type film that's a bit more twisted (and a lot more 80's) I recommend you just watch Xtro (seriously, it's awesome).
But if you're in the mood to crack a beer (or eight) with your old pal Tom, Night of the Creeps is the movie for you.
Fred Dekker was an alien/horror savant in his own right, best known for writing the screenplay for Alien, one of the greatest films ever made. He also wrote and directed both Robocop 3 (the best of the Robocop sequels, if that means anything at all) and a personal favorite: Monster Squad (which is like if you mixed The Goonies with all of the Universal Monsters. The Wolfman having nards is only canon because of Monster Squad and Fred Dekker).
So it makes sense that a guy with such a passion for monsters, aliens, horror, and B-movies would make film like Night of the Creeps. It's also your standard "alien invasion turning people into shells of their former selves" story, but this one is way more on the nose with its comedy. For example, most of the characters in the film have something to do with horror/sci-fi creators: JC is "John Carpenter," there's a Sgt. Raimi, a Detective Landis, a Cameron, and the female love interest is named Cynthia Cronenberg. At one point, an old woman is watching Plan 9 From Outer Space on TV, and Dick Miller shows up for 30 seconds, just so that somebody can call him Walt. Dekker wants it to be absolutely crystal clear: YOU ARE WATCHING AN HOMAGE.
But there's something very special about Night of the Creeps, and that's Tom Fuckin' Atkins:
For the uninitiated, Tom Atkins is like a lesser, poorer, drunker Joe Don Baker, except that's what makes him so amazing. He was a mainstay in cheesy 80's horror, playing the drunken dad in Halloween 3, the drunken dad in Creepshow, the drunken cop in Maniac Cop, and now the drunken cop in Night of the Creeps. There's a theme with Tom Atkins' roles: he's never more than 20 seconds away from another sip of booze.
In fact, our introduction to him in Night of the Creeps is him, in a white suit, on a beach, being served a drink in a coconut (which I'm sure is just room temperature Miller High Life) by two bikini babes. This is the ultimate Tom Atkins fantasy, both in his roles and in his real life. He's the kind of guy who would watch a Spuds Mackenzie commercial and think, "I would love to crack a brew with that dog."
All right, I'm getting ahead of myself. The glory of Tom Atkins doesn't happen right away. We have to...ugh...get through some of the plot first.
We know the basic premise: alien takeover, but Dekker does something kind of cool with it. First we get a little snippet of some adorable aliens running around a spaceship. I guess it's supposed to look cool, but it just reads as a Rick and Morty gag, because the aliens appear to be fleshy naked Pillsbury doughboys with adorable butts.
Evidently one of them is trying to release an experiment, which naturally lands on earth. Cut to 1959 and sorority row of some fake college. Here we're introduced to a couple of fresh faced, clean cut, white, gentile youngsters who head up to makeout point for some necking. The girl has recently spurned a local police officer for some jock (this will only be important because the cop grows up to be Tom Atkins), and the boy is as nondescript as possible. While they're at makeout point, a meteor (the experiment flung from the spacecraft) lands nearby, and the boy drives the car to investigate. While he's poking around the woods looking for the impact spot, the girl hears a report on the radio of an escaped axe murderer from a mental asylum who is headed right toward her.
This is where Night of the Creeps sets itself apart: instead of focusing on just one tried and true trope, Dekker goes for broke. Now we have a young man with an alien slug in his mouth, and a homicidal axe murderer hacking up the young woman in the car. It's a good way to kick things off and keep the audience confused.
Now we flash to 1986, and things quickly go downhill. We're introduced to JC and Chris, two of the most annoying characters in all of film. I understand that they were supposed to be overplayed and hokey, but it gets tiring after about 30 seconds.
Chris pines after the beautiful sorority sister Cynthia Cronenberg, but knows that he'll need to get into a fraternity if he wants any chance with her. The boys are hopeless dweebs but decide to pledge the coolest frat on campus: Beta House, the frat with the best slogan in history.
My head canon is Beta House is populated entirely by the cuck failsons of deep state Reagan administration officials.
So a lot of boring, non-Tom Atkins related things happen until the boys are tasked by the leader of the frat to steal a dead body from the medical school morgue and deliver it to the steps of their rival frat. JC and Chris go to the medical building and find themselves in a room with the frozen body of the 1959 boy from the beginning of the film. JC moronically jams a bunch of buttons, and the body is released. The boys run away, but a poor lab technician gets infected with an alien slug. Now the aliens are loose and reproducing.
The coolest thing about the slugmen is that when they reach a certain point of gestation, their heads just sort of split open and send a bunch of space slugs scurrying around. This is where Detective Tom Atkins comes in, because as bodies start piling up around campus, everyone assumes that they've been axe murdered.
We learn that the young cop who was spurned by the young woman in 1959 was also the cop that first discovered the woman's dismembered corpse. So as more and more head-split bodies show up on campus, cops start assuming that the crazy axe murderer who disappeared in 1959 must be back for more chopping.
But Tom Atkins knows the horrible, booze-soaked truth:
So while everyone assumes the axe murderer is back, Detective Tom Atkins knows that he's dead and buried under the floorboards of what is now Cynthia's sorority house. Still, he's vexed by all of the alleged axe murdering that's going on, because how else could you explain it? The payoff to this sub-plot is the dessicated corpse of the axe murderer bursting through the floorboards of the sorority house mother's room, and Tom Atkins exploding its head with a shotgun, spilling space slugs everywhere.
You can tell where the plot is going from here on out, but the journey isn't terrible. Chris, Cynthia and Tom Atkins have to defend the sorority house from an army of brain-slug infected frat bros. This situation gives us the best line of the film by far:
There are some good kills here and there: Cynthia explodes a guy's head with a flame thrower, Tom Atkins exclaims "It's Miller Time" while he roasts one with a hairspray/cigarette flame thrower (seriously), and Chris uses a lawnmower to kill one of the bros (although it's pretty disappointing).
But nothing tops Tom Atkins going full...well, full Tom Atkins:
The climax of the film is Tom Atkins sacrificing himself by blowing up the basement of the sorority house where all of the brain slugs have collected for some reason. I'm guessing his corpse burned with a hot blue flame for at least 12 hours.
The final shot is Cynthia leaning down to pick up a small dog, who spits a brain slug directly at the camera as it cuts to credits. Because of course it does.
Summary:
This is a pretty easy call. Neither is as amazing as the Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake, but Night of the Creeps has the edge. It's rated R, there's gratuitous 80's nudity, there's some gore, and there's lots of Tom Atkins.
Invaders from Mars is too much of a kid's flick to be gory, and too much of an adult flick to be funny. The whole thing ends up muddled and unsatisfying, even if it is kinda fun to watch Louise Fletcher's career die with a whimper.
If you're really fixing for a good Body Snatchers type film that's a bit more twisted (and a lot more 80's) I recommend you just watch Xtro (seriously, it's awesome).
But if you're in the mood to crack a beer (or eight) with your old pal Tom, Night of the Creeps is the movie for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment