Enough about what’s currently making that strange smell trapped in my fridge though, because it’s movie time! Hooray! Ah, 1986. Run DMC’s Aerosmith cover/collaboration “Walk This Way” and The Beastie Boys’ “You Gotta Fight For Your Right (to Party)” were thumping from ghetto blasters (this kind, not this kind) from the east coast to the left coast. Top Gun was (somehow) topping the box office while Aliens was showing us it was “Game over, man! Game over!” and Americans watched the zany antics of Michael J. Fox and Michael Gross on “Family Ties” and Bea Arthur and her geriatric posse on “The Golden Girls” from the comfort of their La-Z-Boy. One of the more under-the-radar rounds of entertainment to come from that gloriously cheesy 365 day period would be the Fred Dekker zombie orgasm called Night of the Creeps. This is the movie that, with all due respect to Halloween III, cemented Tom Atkins’s role as a movie GOD!

If Fred Dekker sounds familiar at all, it’s not because he’s half of the famed “Black & Dekker” vacuum conglomerate. No my friend, if you were a horror movie fan in the ‘80s, chances are you’ve seen at least one of his two other big creations, House and The Monster Squad. That’s right, the man who taught us that, yes Virginia, Wolf Man’s got nards. Unfortunately it seems that good ol’ Mr. Dekker lost his nards, as his writing credits following that monster testicle abusing adventure would include the Richard Grieco-Linda Hunt movie If Looks Could Kill and the Russell Mulcahy directed pre-Oscar winning Denzel Washington-John Lithgow flick Ricochet, while his sole directing credit (following an episode of “Tales From the Crypt”) would be the abominable and understandably career ending sequel Robocop 3… just when you thought Robocop 2 was the worst Hollywood movie you’d ever see about an android law enforcement officer. But that’s neither here nor there because this is now and we’re reviewing Night of the Creeps, damn it!

Our tale starts 30 years prior to our movie, in 1959 California and the comically named Corman University. It’s above the orbit of Earth where a fugitive alien from the “Naked Foam-Rubber Midgets with Blank Eyes & Lockjaw from Uranus” race steals a dangerous biological weapon from his shipmates and ejects it out of an airlock. The weapon’s containment cylinder crash lands meteor style in a wooded area near Corman U. Not far away, two-timing co-ed hussy Pam and her new beau Johnny witness the impact and Johnny feels compelled to investigate it like, well, like he’s in some 1950s sci-fi b-movie. What exactly is this bio-weapon on interest? It’s a breed of slimy, phallic, brain eating space slug parasites that projectile their slimy asses through the air and orally introduce themselves, burrowing into your head and laying eggs, turning their hosts into murderous zombie incubators! Johnny, as you can imagine, becomes the first of their victims. Meanwhile, Pam’s not fairing so well either, as she’s left alone in Johnny’s car to be dismembered by an escaped axe murderer wielding, well, an axe. Not a good night be college kids out “parking”.

From here we FF>> to the modern day (or twenty years ago if you’re on our time) of 1986, where Corman University still stands proud and is welcoming it’s newest class of miscreants, co-eds and keggers. It’s here that we meet our heroes: nerdy white guy Chris Romero and his bosom buddy John Carpenter Hooper; the crutch bound Duckie to Chris’s Andie Walsh… I didn’t include a Pretty In Pink joke because I like the movie, just because it too was born of 1986 and I thought I’d keep the references running… Seriously, I don’t watch John Hughes movies… shut the fuck up Farmer Ted and get back to the task at hand!

Beyond the typical geek tribulations the boys have to go through, like frat boys and calculus rodeos, Chris finds himself immediately in love with sexy sorority babe Cynthia Cronenberg, not solely because her name is also taken from a noted ‘80s horror director, but I’m sure it doesn’t hurt. In an effort in impress the little lady, Chris drags JC along with him as he tries out for a frat house that just so happens (thanks to ‘80s college movie irony) to be led by Cynthia’s current boyfriend and preppy Hitler Youth Brad, last name not important. And what is our boys’ initiation requirement? Steal a cadaver from the campus science labs and drop it on the doorstep of another frat. No problem, it’s as simple as corpse pie.

The body the guys decide on is actually the cryogenically corpse-sicled Johnny, who’s been keep in frozen stasis on school grounds for 3 decades… why, I don’t know, but the important thing is that old Johnny and his Martian halitosis mouth parasites thaw out and the real fun can get underway!

As you can imagine (especially if you’ve seen the movie before… and you really fucking should have by now, damn it!), Corman U becomes a hot bed of bad movie madness, finally living up to it’s namesake. The slippery little space slugs reproduce exponentially, munching collegiate gray matter and giving the student body something to do other than drink, fuck and sleep through class. Assigned to the case is Detective Ray Cameron, who just so happens to be the ex-fiance of our opening scene’s axe victim Pam! He also just so happens to be a walking, talking bad-ass, kinda crazy, “plays by his own rules” cop that’s 20ft of sarcasm and quotable lines in the 6ft tall, mustache clad frame of Tom Atkins. Again, Tom Atkins = GOD.

When it all boils down to our zombies killing finale, JC suffers a heartbreaking end (it always sucks to see one of the most lovable characters die); Chris winds up with Cyn when she realizes (like all the hot chicks in ‘80s romantic comedies) that semi-awkward geeks are much better boyfriend material than preppy dick bag frat boys with vanity license plates that say “BRADSTER”; and Det. Cameron, formerly the most unsuccessful attempted suicide case this side of Moe Syzlak, finally puts away the pain of his long dead love Pam when he blows himself up Muslim Extremist style and takes the rest of the alien parasite thingies with him… well, except for that one that’s been nesting inside the sorority den mother’s dog… unless you’re watching the TV version of the movie, which ended with a crispy zombie Cameron shuffling down the street away from the scene of the explosion, only to fall to the ground and have his skull crack open, releasing a small wave of the greasy little beasties that scurry to a nearby graveyard, where the aliens’ ship (no idea what it’s been up to for the last 30 years…) arrives, searching the area with a spotlight. Either way we’re left with an open invitation for a sequel that was never meant to be. Oh well, at least we can all sleep safely in our beds at night, atop the heaping pile of our decaying victims, secure in the knowledge that at least nobody ruined the movie’s greatness with what probably would’ve turned out to be a substandard sequel.

Much like other great horror comedies of the ‘80s, Night of the Creeps is well balanced with laughs, violence, gore and great pre-CGI makeup effects! It reminds us of a simpler time when the big names of Tinsletown wouldn’t be caught dead near our movies, thus making them “sucker free” as the colorful chaps on MTV2 would say. Big studios didn’t bother interfering too much, because they knew that these flicks weren’t going to draw in a huge audience so much as it was going to be fan service to a dedicated group of loyalists who were just waiting for something good and gory to drop their Washingtons on. With a terminally awesome character like Detective Cameron, a wormy kid-turned-one-liner spouting hero, characters named after fan favorite genre directors (including two cops named Raimi and Landis) and more exploding brain parasites than you can shake a copy of Phantasm II at, Night of the Creeps more than earns it’s spot in any Top 10 Horror Movies of the Eighties list. Oh yeah, and all Ed Wood supporters out there can look forward to a brief cameo by Plan 9 From Outer Space as it pops up on an old lady’s TV set. There’s nothing in this movie NOT to like!