Standy By Me

Rob Reiner directs this adaptation of a Stephen King novella called “The Body.” Everybody seems to love this movie, and with good reason: it’s a touching story about four 12-year-old boys in the fictional town of Castle Rock, Oregon, in 1959. They’re at that lovely age of boyhood where girls haven’t entered the consciousness (not fully anyway), and they’re more interested in having adventures with each other than anything else in the world. These four, played by Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O’Connell, are particularly lucky children because their parents basically ignore them, thus freeing them to embark on a 20-mile hike along a railroad track, searching for the body of a missing boy. (They’re of course very unlucky in that they’re not particularly loved, but the movie uses this to its advantage to manipulate us constantly.)

It’s frustrating to feel such love for this movie, yet be nagged by the gnawing suspicion that it’s a total manipulation. Perhaps if we did not learn that one of the characters later dies tragically as an adult, the movie’s evocative depictions of childhood nostalgia and innocence wouldn’t feel so calculated. But make no bones about it: this movie is calculated. It’s just so well-done that it’s hard not to be emotionally affected. Stand By Me is genuinely enjoyable entertainment, and yet it’s somehow wickedly aware of what it’s doing to the audience.

What feels authentic are the performances, especially of River Phoenix and Wil Wheaton. Phoenix is a natural actor, channeling such powerful emotions at such a young age, and his tragic early death at the age of 23 made him a contemporary James Dean figure, enshrined in cult status. Oh that he could still be with us today, even if it meant the descent into mediocrity that befell all three of his co-stars.

Manhunter

Based on the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon, Manhunter (1986) has a lush veneer but nothing underneath it. The film follows a detective named Will Graham (William Petersen) as he tracks a serial killer nicknamed the Tooth Fairy (Tom Noonan) with the help of incarcerated murderer Dr. Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox). Manhunter looks cool: Michael Mann has an eye for framing a scene, and he’s adept at using lighting and modern architecture to full effect. But there’s something soulless about his films. When Brian De Palma gives in to his urges for heavy stylization, we profit by it: De Palma’s best thrillers are fun to watch, and there’s some kind of pathos amidst the swirling camera and garish colors. Michael Mann has learned the skills of filmmaking without any particular understanding of how to make us care. So the best I can say about Manhunter is that I admired the craftsmanship and liked the music—a synthsezied score by Michel Rubini and The Reds. The protagonist is supposed to be a skillful detective because he can get into the heads of the killers, which put him over the edge before. But somehow, the emotional weight of that never affects us. Petersen gives a good performance (he looks like he was lifted from Miami Vice), and so does Dennis Farina as his superior, who drags him back into investigative work after a much-needed sabbatical. With Kim Greist, Joan Allen, and Stephen Lang.

The Fly

In The Fly (1986), Jeff Goldblum, playing a scientist named Seth Brundle, slowly transforms into a bug, and the make-up effects of Chris Walas are utterly horrifying. The first half of the movie is actually kind of sweet: it's about an eccentric but lovable scientist, working on a teleportation device--who falls in love with a journalist played by Geena Davis. Their chemistry together is believable, and both of them have presence on the screen, real presence that commands our attention. But as Seth transforms into this hideous bug, the film itself turns into nothing more than a spectacle, as though director David Cronenberg is saying: "Hey look at this crazy shit right here!" Perhaps I wouldn't complain if the spectacle were more interesting. As much as Cronenberg seems to want to be the lit theory horror filmmaker par excellence, conjuring up allusions to Kafka's Metamorphosis and turning The Fly into a blank canvas on which can be read quite a few metaphors, from the AIDS crisis to the cocaine crisis to our growing anxieties about science--The Fly lost me. The effects were more than I could take, and that's saying something. But more than just gag-inducing make-up effects, The Fly essentially has too little going on in it once the romance dissolves and it becomes Geena Davis watching helplessly as her tortured, brilliant lover turns into a hideous creature. With John Getz. Written by Cronenberg and Charles Edward Pogue, from the George Langelaan novel. (And of course, it's a remake of a 1958 sci-fi shocker starring Vincent Price.)

Aliens

Aliens (1986). Director James Cameron gives Alien the blockbuster treatment, pumping it full of action and his signature brand of dumb, occasionally successful humor. Cameron brings back Sigourney Weaver, the survivor of the first film, this time accompanying a squadron of Marines to the planet where her ill-fated crew discovered the alien eggs in the first movie. That planet has since been colonized by humans, blissfully unaware of the lurking danger. The expected aliens vs. people action ensues. There’s not as much subtlety this time around, and the film works you over pretty thoroughly. But Cameron also humanizes Ellen Ripley by awakening her maternal instinct: she discovers an orphaned girl (Carrie Henn) hiding from the aliens in an air vent. As big and dumb as much of it is, Aliens is an effective thriller with at least a few terrific little nuggets of dialogue; its shortcomings (including a murkiness that sometimes makes it impossible to tell what’s happening onscreen) are bolstered by Sigourney Weaver’s command of the screen. And the film ratchets up the distrust of capitalism that the first film introduced, by introducing a corporate sleazeball (Paul Reiser) who wants the mission to salvage some of those slimy aliens for profit. (Weaver gets to say the film’s best line to him: “I don’t know which species is worse: you don’t see them trying to f*** each other over for a percentage.” With Michael Biehn, Henriksen, Jeanette Goldstein, Bill Paxton, and William Hope. Written by the director. Music by James Horner. Produced by Cameron’s Terminator collaborator Gale Ann Hurd.

Hannah and Her Sisters

Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) has a lot going for it: winning performances by Mia Farrow, Michael Caine, Barbara Hershey, Dianne Wiest, Maureen O’Sullivan, and Max von Sydow; a wonderful soundtrack of jazz music that almost deflates the problems of the people in the movie; and a surprisingly grimy portrayal of New York City. To my recollection, it didn’t have any wide shots of the Big Apple, and most of the times the city is shown under a gloomy grey sky or at night, making many of the larger, dirty old buildings seem forlorn and almost Victorian in their gloom, as if they were exported from a Dickens novel about poor people. It feels like a more honest depiction of living in a big city, especially New York in the 80s.

But there is one lovely scene of New York in which Michael Caine—who’s fallen in love with his sister-in-law, Lee (played by Barbara Hershey)—goes with her to a bookstore. Caine retrieves a volume of poems by e.e. cummings and buys it for Lee, insisting that she read the poem on page 112. (Later, we hear a voice-over of Lee reading it, and it’s one of the loveliest moments in the film.) That bookstore was truly heavenly with all those books stacked up, up, up and everywhere. And the romantic complications of Caine and Hershey’s unanticipated love for each other are dealt with relatively lightly, which is a good instinct on the part of Woody Allen.

Woody Allen in many of ways was my biggest problem with Hannah and Her Sisters, and yet, he’s also responsible for much of the good in this very charming, very amusing, film. Allen plays Mickey, the ex-husband of the title character Hannah (Mia Farrow). Micky is the usual Allen type: neurotic, obsessive, whiny, hypochondriacal. And he grates on the nerves in the usual Allen way. But there are some funny bits that he very generously gives himself. For instance, after various medical tests Mickey believes that he’s dying, but when CAT-scan results prove the opposite, he’s left with the reality that eventually, he will die, and that life is rendered meaningless in the light of this fact, especially if there is no God. Mickey, born and raised a Jew, then begins a spiritual quest that leads him to the Catholic Church for a time, and then to the Hare Krishnas for an even shorter time.

But Mickey’s story, which is interwoven with the stories of Hannah, her sister Lee (Hershey), and her other sister, a struggling actress named Holly (Dianne Wiest), is self-indulgent. Although it is funny some of the time, it’s also a constant reminder of the director’s arrogance. Why does it have to be about Woody Allen all the time? Hannah and Her Sisters really shines in some moments, but Mickey’s constant whining about the meaning of life sometimes feels like a buzz kill.

Still, there are so many lovely moments in Hannah and Her Sisters that it’s difficult to dislike the movie just because of the Mickey scenes and their tendency to grate on one’s nerves. Maureen O’Sullivan (mother of Mia Farrow in real life) is another highlight, playing the three sisters’ mom, who still likes to flirt with young men and drinks too much at parties (a tricky combination). She and her husband (played by Lloyd Nolan) have an argument somewhere in the second half of the movie, but it all melts away when he sits down and plays the piano. There’s a scene shortly after at a Thanksgiving gathering they’re hosting, where he sort of introduces his wife by telling a story about her from when they were dating: the men used to be so distracted by her beauty, they would drive their cars into the sidewalk. She smiles and then he plays the piano some more. How lovely that a man can recall such flattering memories of his wife and make her the star of the show with just his words.

Hannah and Her Sisters ends on a problematic note: Mickey begins dating Holly, the failed-actress-turned-struggling-writer, and after they’re married she announces that she’s pregnant. It’s as if Woody Allen was the secret to happiness, because after she writes a play and reads it to him, they begin dating. It seems quite clear that her attraction to him is based on his lavish praise of her writing. (Earlier, the movie shows us a date between them years before where they did not hit it off and vowed to themselves never to see each other again.) It feels phony and hampers the film, which up to that point, at least tries to deal honestly with relationships.

With Carrie Fisher, Julie Kavner, Daniel Stern, Sam Waterston, and Julia Louis Dreyfus. 

From Beyond

From Beyond (1986) is director Stuart Gordon's follow-up to Re-Animator, and it's a misfired attempt to see if lightning can in fact strike twice. You know you're in trouble when the source of the conflict and the horror is a device that, when turned on, unleashes a monstrous power from another dimension. I mean, all you have to do is not turn it on, right? Problem solved. So how to get the characters in the movie to keep turning that sucker on...

The characters are not that far removed from Re-Animator. There's a nerdy researcher played by Jeffrey Combs, and a self-important psychiatrist played by Barbara Crampton (who is once again molested on camera by a terrifying creature), and an overly good-natured cop played by Ken Foree who's hired to accompany the other two to an isolated house where they can observe a strange contraption known as the Resonator. The Resonator is a big metal, phallic-looking machine that, when switched on, reveals slimy, snake-like, floating creatures that can attack if they detect humans. The machine's creator, the eccentric, kinky Dr. Pretorius (Ted Sorel), is ostensibly beheaded by some creature accessed via the Resonator, but then we discover that he's actually been pulled into another world and is now an extremely powerful, shape-shifting creature with mind-controlling abilities.

I'm sure you're as riveted reading about this as I was watching it. The whole thing feels absolutely ridiculous, but not in a good way. There's not enough humor in From Beyond, and the movie relies on the stupid decisions of its characters to tell its story. The only character I liked--Ken Foree's--is poorly conceived, but at least has the good sense to utter the line that dogs so many possessed house movies: "Let's get the hell out of here." (Or some variation of that.) But Barbara Crampton can't leave, because she's doing important work. And Combs's character comes off as a weakling who has little if any influence in this story. He's absolutely forgettable.

As with Re-Animator, there's an attempt to shape an H.P. Lovecraft short story into a compelling horror film that mixes icky gore with clever humor. Unfortunately, From Beyond retains little of that film's novelty. It's structurally a bit of a remake of Re-Animator (and fans of the 2006 horror-scifi film Slither may find in From Beyond some intriguing parallels), but being like Re-Animator isn't enough. It's nice to see a director who can turn more than one trick. If that's asking too much, then the same trick has to be fresh enough for a second go-round. This one turns out a dud. Written by the director, Dennis Paoli, and producer Brian Yuzna. ★½

Vamp

Low-grade horror-comedy about two buddies who stumble upon a strip club full of vampires in a city that is, by night, a hot-bed of bloodsuckers. The "head" vampire, Katrina (Grace Jones), is a tall, fangy creature with Egyptian roots, so the movie suggests. But she's really not that scary or intimidating, and unlike the suave, charming vampire Chris Sarandon played in the original Fright Night, she isn't any fun. She's just a freak.

Chris Makepeace and Robert Rusler have an amiable chemistry together, especially in the beginning when they're being hazed by a particularly infantile group of frat brothers. But the film doesn't make much use out of that charm. Director Richard Wenk (he co-wrote the screenplay with Donald Borchers) doesn't have much of a flair for creating suspenseful situations. The movie has a nice comic book feel, but the simple-minded plot keeps it from generating into anything fun or exciting. Just about every scene promises more than it delivers: Makepeace is chased by a gang of thugs into a sewer system, which seems like it could have been used for a good scare sequence, but the thugs don't go in after him, and it lessens the impact.

There's an odd combination of green and pink neon lighting that permeates the movie, giving it a nice "red light district" feeling, but it's overused, and it doesn't do much more than conceal the fact that the movie wasn't designed with much thought or imagination. The lighting becomes a crutch rather than an enhancer of real atmosphere. With Dedee Pfeiffer, Gedde Watanabe, and, in an amusing role as Katrina's guardian/manager, Sandy Baron. 1986.

Blue Velvet

Writer-director David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) exists in a suburban vacuum that's some kind of tangled 1950s-1980s dream. Lynch takes a highly normal suburban boyhood fantasy, becoming involved in a real-life mystery, and throws it into the depths of sordidness. It's almost too enticing to witness the undressing of suburbia, a place that is so squeaky clean on the outside it almost has to be a den of devils on the inside. Kyle MacLachlan plays the hero, Jeffrey, who discovers a severed human ear while walking through a field near his quiet Lumberton hometown, a place that recalls every falsely cheerful family sitcom ever made.

Jeffrey wastes no time in delivering the ear to the local police, but this effectively ends his ability to partake in the mystery legally, so, with the help of the detective's teenage daughter, Sandy (Laura Dern), he proceeds with his own makeshift investigation and sneaks into the apartment of a lounge singer (Isabella Rossellini), whose name Sandy has heard mentioned in connection with the ongoing investigation of the detached ear. The lounge singer is named Dorothy Vallens, and she's about as stable as Judy Garland. She has that tragic look, mixed with a distinctively foreign allure that makes her suspect to our suburbanite values and beliefs. (Rossellini is the daughter of Ingrid Bergman, and you can hear it in her voice and see it in her face.)

Enter Dennis Hopper as Frank, the psychotic, drug-addicted, sadomasochist who's forcing Dorothy to comply with his weird fetishistic fantasies. Frank's got to be one of the scariest human figures in horror-thriller movie history, on par with Robert Mitchum's Reverend Harry Powell in Night of the Hunter and Jack Nicholson's nutcase hotel sitter in The Shining. This is the point in the movie where Jeffrey is probably thinking that "normal" isn't so bad, and that those mysteries we read about as children and watched on television and at the movies were deliciously entertaining because they were false, safe mysteries where even the worst villains conducted themselves within reasonable boundaries. Dennis Hopper has no boundaries, nor does the director, who puts us in the position of the peeping tom and the "peeped-upon," on a far more visceral and uncomfortable level than say, Hitchcock did, in his Rear Window.

The thing about Blue Velvet is that it's an off-putting descent into a frightening suburban reality, because it breaks through the surface in others that we often feel superior to, and in the process, it exposes our own carefully constructed phoniness as an obviously thin veneer. Sandy says to Jeffrey, "I don't know whether you're a detective or a pervert," after he tells her of his plan to infiltrate Dorothy's apartment for the first time. He tells her with false coyness that she'll just have to find out. What he really means is that he'll just have to find out, because he doesn't know himself well enough to know what he really wants, why he's really attracted to the "mystery". For him, "mystery" is still a gimmick designed primarily for his own amusement, not something that involves or affects real people. It lulls him in with the siren song of the false mysteries (the camera occasionally shows us shots of various 1940s film noirs on the TV screen, a reminder of the ground we're treading, which is quite far away from the mock-sophisticated safety of Hollywood). In David Lynch territory, nothing is ever safe and neat and tidy. But it's not a pleasurable entertainment. It's on the level of a snuff movie, and for all its ironic insights into human nature and the phoniness of the world it portrays, it's hard to watch.

With Dean Stockwell, Hope Lange, George Dickerson, Priscilla Pointer, Frances Bay, and Brad Dourif.

April Fool's Day

After the success of Halloween in 1978, you couldn't keep a hack director from turning any conceivable holiday into a slasher movie, from Friday the 13th (1980) to New Year's Evil (1980), My Bloody Valentine (1981), and Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) (not to mention 1975's Black Christmas). Most of those were humorless and bland. The producer of Friday the 13th, Frank Mancuso, decided to make one with tongue firmly in cheek, and came up with April Fool's Day (1986), which is in my opinion the best of the bunch after Black Christmas and Halloween.

It's a free adaptation of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians, which is the precursor to all slasher movies. The movie uses the beloved Christie mystery novel to set up its plot of a group of privileged college kids spending spring break at their friend Muffy St. John's lonely island manor, where it seems that April Fool's Day pranks don't always turn out to be just pranks. The sparkling Deborah Foreman, star of 1983's Valley Girl, plays Muffy, who miraculously hasn't turned into a snob despite her wealth and privilege.

The movie has characters you like, and tries to take them a little deeper than most of its ilk. It doesn't succeed all the way, and there's a sense in which you wonder if it could have really nailed the genre and its own storyline better, more sharply, then it does in its admittedly sloppy form. And many story points are loose and undeveloped. For example, someone has planted strange objects in the guests' rooms, but these are hardly touched on, and really are placed in the movie as a mere convenience for the creators to imitate the Agatha Christie story where the characters had all gotten away with murders and were being punished for them. 

One of the most noticeable flaws is the cinematography by Charles Minsky. He seems fixated on undermining dialogue by focusing our attention elsewhere. I gather it was a stylistic device, but if so, Minsky could have had a little more vision. He treats the movie's attempt at character-building drama like soap opera scenes, and thus gives them more of an audience than they deserve. There's the couple most likely to get married after college, Amy Steel (the scream queen from Friday the 13th Part 2, who possesses a very likable and natural quality about her) and Ken Olandt (he appeared in the Mark Harmon high school comedy Summer School). They have serious discussions about their futures, and it really just seems like plot filler extracted from The Young and the Restless. (There is a funny scene where they're in bed and the lights have been rigged to not turn off). There are, nevertheless, some effective shots, such as the transition from one of the characters falling into a well full of floating heads to a shot of her sitting, head down, at the table, while the others stand in the background. It's effective and in a way saves that moment of the movie from its clunkiness. (The well sequence isn't particularly believable.)

The characters are believable. One's a calculating Texas frat boy type who's bucking to get a job for Muffy's wealthy father. One is a stilted English major who reads Milton and doesn't fit in with the sex-obsessed, "hip" members of the group. She's the uninitiated (often the character who turns out to be the killer in these types of movies).

The movie is banal but it's also plucky and good-natured, so you have a hard time disliking it. It also makes fun of the cliches on which it relies, and so it may be the first self-aware slasher movie, one which is ultimately playing a deviously fun trick on its audience. The other cast members are Deborah Goodrich, Clayton Rohner, Thomas F. Wilson (Biff from Back to the Future), Jay Baker, Griffin O'Neal, and Leah King Pinsent. It was directed by Fred Walton of When A Stranger Calls (1979) fame.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

Fear of Laughter: Twelve years after he left audiences reeling with his 1974 exploitation shocker The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Tobe Hooper returned with a sequel that tried to encapsulate the glossy, synthetic, yuppie milieu of the 80s just as its predecessor seemed to capture the 70s in documentary fashion. Tobe Hooper has an intensely kinesthetic directing style: the things going on in his movies are often too much for the camera to contain. Sometimes it seems as if the camera merely sits like a spectator while something horrendously witty and unpleasant occurs. You're often laughing just as much as you're jumping, and then you're chiding yourself for finding it so funny. But over-the-top horror is designed to be funny. It's too horrible to elicit anything but confused laughter. We're afraid of our laughter because it seems out of place, and simultaneously we're laughing because we're afraid. Few movies can achieve this, and yet I won't call The Texas Chainsaw Masssacre Part 2 a great movie, a good movie, or even a successful movie.

Frankly, it's a complete mess. It seems as though much of the action happened on the fly, and while that can frequently have promising and spontaneously happy results, much of this horror opus is experienced with a mixture of excruciating boredom and disenjoyment. We are waiting for it to be over, yet unable to look away from the pure spectacle of it all. The first half hour is the best part of the movie. Hooper opens with a really interesting scare scene involving two obnoxious frat boys driving through the Texas countryside on their way to Dallas. Their latest antic is playing "Chicken" with other cars, and as can be expected, they piss off the wrong family of backwoods cannibalistic psychopaths, and live to regret it. The whole murder scene happens while the yuppie frat boys are on the phone with a local radio station, and so the murder--apparently a grand return of the maniacal Sawyer family--is captured on the air. The deejay at the radio station replays it at the request of an equally nutty ex-Texas ranger (Dennis Hopper) who's been hunting for the Sawyer family for years (his niece and nephew were victims in the original), and of course angers the Sawyers, who make her their next target.

The scene in the radio station is genuinely creepy, capped off with a great scare moment. After meeting the crazed Vietnam Vet Chop Top (Bill Moseley), the deejay, nicknamed "Stretch" (Caroline Williams), is accosted by Leatherface, who's as mixed up as ever. After that the movie falls apart while Hooper takes us to a run-down Texas battle-themed amusement park, the new lair of the Sawyers, and attempts to repeat the unappealing scenarios of the 1974 film where the sole survivor (Marilyn Burns) became the "dinner guest" at the Sawyer's farmhouse.

The movie is full of over-acting and bizarreness, but then that's really the point. And yet, it's a fascinating subject for cultural analysis. We see the elements of a family that has completely lost touch with reality, has a paralyzing fear of the outside world and an inability to cope with the human body, dead or alive. Loss of life is countered by the preservation of family corpses in various "artistic" fashions. The Hitchhiker, killed in the first film, becomes attire, worn like a puppet to cover Leatherface's own body when he's dancing from the roof of their pickup truck attacking the yuppies with his chainsaw. The grandmother is now hoisted on a strange throne at the top of one of the amusement park "mountains." Loss of bodily function is equally problematic. Chop Top, shot in Vietnam, has a metal plate in his head and his degenerating psyche seeps out into the way he dresses and the lack of attention he pays to hygiene. I wondered if the make-up artist on Beetle Juice had him in mind when he designed Michael Keaton's face for that character. There's a remarkable similarity between Chop Top and Beetle Juice, and even the comic timing is about the same, except we feel a lot safer around Beetle Juice because that movie stays much more carefully within the limits of its genre. The macabre elements are there but the gruesomeness is deemphasized.


Tobe Hooper has always been a problematic director. Little of his work seems to be pulled off just right. I've often wanted to like the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but for all its technical pleasures it's a movie that is hard to enjoy, and likewise, its sequel is only marginally entertaining. Hooper needed a good script supervisor and a better editor, perhaps, to make Part 2 a little more compact (its 100 minutes feel like 140), but then the 80 minute original felt too long too.

Night of the Creeps

Movie Imposters. Did you know that January is the month when studios dump the crummy movies onto an unsuspecting public gorged on holiday food and a glut of "important" Oscar-bait? Perusing the roster at my local multiplex confirmed this with such dazzling prospects as Season of the Witch, The Dilemma, Country Strong, No Strings Attached, and The Green Hornet (which looks like it might be the best time among this selection). After that, it's leftovers from 2010, and isn't 2010 old news already?

Shall we go back, then, to 1986? Where in Night of the Creeps, a pair of less-than-smooth college buddies accidentally unleashes an alien parasite that turns people into incubators so that it can reproduce itself by the hundreds. The slimy alien-thing looks like a slug (if you saw Slither, that movie most assuredly borrowed from this one), and it slithers across the ground at a remarkable pace. The movie, directed and written by Fred Dekker, is essentially grabbing as many B horror movie plot elements, throwing them against the ceiling, and seeing what sticks. There's the tormented detective (played by Tom Atkins) whose high school sweetheart was chopped into pieces by an axe murderer in 1959. He's apparently still bothered by the 27-year-old case that happened when he was barely two weeks with a badge, and now he thinks that the axe murderer may have been "regenerated" by those slug things, which have the affect of turning their human subjects into zombies (until they leave their host for another). There's the fraternity-sorority drama that has been the basis for a number of horror movies in the 1970s and 1980s (and has informed plenty of non-horror plots as well). Jumping back to the detective's story, there's the homicidal maniac on the loose plot.

Dekker's script, frankly, tries too hard to be an homage, and tries even harder to be self-aware so as to outsmart its audience. Fortunately there are moments when Dekker forgets himself and allows us to simply have a good time at his movie. After all, it's the kind of flick you would watch late at night for a good laugh, so it shouldn't require too much from a filmmaker in terms of plot development. Dekker smothers his dialogue with corny lines and obvious statements such as, "this is like a bad B movie." Atkins has most of the crummiest lines. For some reason Dekker or perhaps Atkins thought it would be funny to have the detective call everyone he meets by some cartoonish character name. He also makes liberal use of the catch phrase, "thrill me," which isn't bad as dumb catch phrases go, but it gets overused.

Night of the Creeps is keenly aware of all the important and not-so-important movies of its genre of choice, and of course the pleasure--or the hoped-for pleasure--is in seeing what the cast and crew will do with that. How will they manipulate our knowledge of Night of the Living Dead and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and every other piece of horror schtick which the movie has set out to alternately canonize and lampoon? The problem is, it gets so repetitive that audiences may grow bored. You're waiting for something truly uncanny to happen, but (perhaps because of budgetary constraints), the movie relies chiefly on its perceived cheekiness (and its only marginally appealing cast) to stretch out the plot until the big finale where the frat brothers are turned into the walking dead and head to the Beta house to "pick up their dates."

What is ultimately going on in Night of the Creeps is that, rather than being a commentary on society, it's a commentary on moviemaking and movie love. The hosts (i.e. the humans whose brains become incubators for the slugs) are the various plots of horror movies that have been made and made money over the years. The little slithering alien slugs are inside them, incubating, reproducing, until they tear through the flesh and the bone and escape so that they can create imitations of the original. After all, this is Dekker's love letter to his favorite horror movies, and he's not very subtle in giving characters names like Cronenberg, Romero, and Carpenter (even the college is called Corman University). Dekker wants to pay tribute, and while it's not a total washout, Night of the Creeps is firsthand documentation of the tension between trying to be original and trying to imitate for the sake of imitation. It tries to do something a little out of the ordinary, but then doubles back in fear that it might go against the current "masters" of the horror movie. With Jason Lively, Jill Whitlow, Steve Marshall, Allan Kayser, Dick Morris, and Suzanne Snyder.