Night of the Creeps

I wish this could’ve been what the first 10 minutes were. Those 10 minutes are filled with camp and nostalgia and love for 50’s B-level monster movies. The cheesy alien suits, filming in black and white, the overly earnest acting. It’s delightful, and at this point, the movie has its tongue surgically implanted in its cheek. It’s marvelous. As soon as the movie jumps to present day, it all falls apart. The whimsical and corny tone is is smothered to death by a wildly uneven pacing that front-loads the movie with so much stuff that nobody is here to see. A romance AND a bromance, a cop with a past, nerds versus a frat … I came here for B-movie schlock about space slugs turning people into zombies, not a nerd crushing after the girl next door girlfriend of the frat’s resident alpha douche. Production gaffes that cause plot holes and terrible ADR are strewn about the runtime. All the action the movie description promises is back-loaded to the final fifteen minutes, and the problem is dispatched with all the effort of making toaster waffles on a Sunday morning. The make up is good, and Tom Atkins tears through scenery like the Kool Aid Man, but the movie around him can’t keep up, or even maintain what it’s trying to do. Or even seems to know what it wants to be. It’s not boring, and I do seem to be in the minority opinion on this movie’s quality, so maybe you, reader, will enjoy it more. It was passable for me, and only just.