Movie Time Capsule Blog #5: Night of the Creeps

In Hollywood, there are many different ways to say you stole an idea. There are remakes, reboots, and reimaginings, if you try to make an idea your own in entirety. If done in part it can be seen as a reference, a nod, or homage if done in a loving fashion.

So what exactly do you call a movie that is essentially a reimagining of another movie that was a comedic homage to another more serious movie? Further more, why lie about having seen either film?

James Gunn is best known for writing such reimaginings as the live action “Scooby Doo” movies and director Zack Snyder’s version of “Dawn of the Dead.” So for his directorial debut as a director, Gunn decided to film the movie “Slither” from his own script.

“Slither” is a ridiculously gory horror-comedy about a small town under attack from alien parasites that enter through a human mouth and proceed to take over their host until they explode. Admittedly, it is a very entertaining movie, but while watching it I didn’t find it terribly original. David Cronenberg had made a movie early in 1975 called “Shivers” that was quite similar, and in 1986 Fred Dekker made a movie called “Night of the Creeps” that was essentially the exact same movie as “Slither,” but “Slither” had a bigger budget and Gunn made the protagonists middle aged adults instead of college students.

In a shocking display of chutzpah, James Gunn has repeatedly denied ever having seen “Shivers” or “Night of the Creeps” before filming and insists his idea was completely original. The man who made a living off other people’s creations was trying to insist that his latest movie had nothing to do with two films that had already come out.

When asked about Gunn’s film, Cronenberg and Dekker both had different reactions. Dekker let the argument go by insisting that both “Slither” and “Creeps” had been influenced by Cronenberg’s work. Cronenberg, however, admits that while “Creeps” had been influenced by “Shivers,” “Slither” was so close in tone to “Creeps” that he thought Dekker should sue.

As such, the never released on DVD “Night of the Creeps” has been gaining quite the following. I had only briefly heard about it while growing up, but I hadn’t seen it until two weeks ago. Now that I have, I can see why so many people are angered by the fact that Gunn is a huge liar.

“Night of the Creeps” doesn’t really get started on the right foot. It opens with some ridiculously cheesy 1980’s style opening titles before we are transported to a spaceship with two aliens who look like The Gingerdead Man. The aliens are trying to contain an experiment gone awry that despite having zero gravity in space ends up hurtling towards earth.

From there we are treated to a well made but overlong black and white sequence starting outside a sorority house in 1959. This is also the point where the comparisons to “slither” begin, but more on that later.

The experiment from space manages to crash land in the woods behind a lovers lane style cliffside. A young man and woman are getting crazy 1950’s style (meaning no one gets past second base) when their party is broken up by a police officer who happens to be the ex-boyfriend of the woman in the car.

Apparently, a deranged axe murderer has escaped from a nearby mental hospital and has been seen in the area. Before going on their way, however, the young man wants to look for whatever crashed in the woods. As with most characters in such opening sequences they both end up dead. The young man is infected by an alien parasite entering through his mouth and the young woman is slaughtered by the axe murderer.

The action then shifts, by way of an abrupt title card, to a university campus during fraternity pledge week, and two young men named Christopher and James trying unsuccessfully to meet women. Well, James isn’t really trying despite being the more charismatic of the two. Christopher instead has James do all his bidding for him since he freezes whenever he is around a girl.

Amongst all the girls in what appears to be a campus wide kegger (judging by the fact that every tree and building is covered in toilet paper), Chris notices Cindy and has James hit on her to no avail. Not because she doesn’t find James’ playing up of Chris charming, but because she is dating the head of Beta House.

While that scene might sound like a stock set up for any typical spam-in-a-dorm room slasher film, Dekker injects his script with so many witty one liners you probably miss one or two because you are too busy snickering at the one that came before it. James, in spirit but not in nerdiness, was clearly one of the characters that inspired Randy Meeks in the “Scream” films. So much so that if you see “Night of the Creeps” you might end up thinking “Scream” scribe Kevin Williamson should be sued. But at least Williamson readily admits “Night of the Creeps” was influential.

From there, Chris decides that the two should pledge as Beta’s with the hope that Cindy will noticed him if they are in a frat. Clearly when they arrive Chris and James are two have-nots in a room full of the most privileged people on campus. With no intention of ever accepting them as equals, Brad, Cindy’s bleach blonde alcoholic boyfriend, sends Chris and James on a quest to pull off the most epic prank ever: steal a corpse and place it on the lawn of a rival fraternity.

Since there wouldn’t be a movie if they didn’t try, Chris and James decide to go along with the plan. Instead of going to a graveyard or funeral home, they decide to break into a medical lab where they find the cryogenically preserved body of the young man from the beginning and since there wouldn’t be a movie if they didn’t, they defrost him.

They end out running out of the lab without the corpse when discovered by a scientist played by David Paymer, who had a small role in yesterday’s MTC entry, “No Holds Barred.” It was at this point that I noticed something about James. In the party scene James makes a reference to how he has crutches and being a movie from the 1980’s I expected it to be a joke; almost as if James was only using them to meet girls and gain sympathy. When they get to the lab and during their subsequent escape, I realize that James legitimately can not walk without them. At that point, I was watching and waiting for a single person to make a joke about it or for James to use them as an excuse for not doing something. Save for a scene later in the film where Brad gives him a sucker kick to the shin, no one ever makes light of it and it is accepted by everyone around him without question. I was starting to think that such movies weren’t made in the 80’s.

Needless to say, the corpse infects the scientist before escaping the lab only to end up on the lawn of Cindy’s sorority house with an exploded head. Enter Detective Cameron; the police officer from the beginning who is now a grizzled old veteran with haunting memories from the night he apparently watched his ex-girlfriend get chopped up by an axe wielding psychopath.

Detective Cameron is the kind of cop that people love to watch. He has seen everything in life and he manifests his contempt for everyone around him in the form of bitter sarcasm. Screenwriter Shane Black (most famous for “Lethal Weapon”) admitted that Cameron was the basis for Val Kilmer’s character in the newer cult favourite “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.” Both characters even answer their phones by saying “Thrill me.” Black doesn’t really need to admit it since Black and Dekker (tee-hee) co-wrote “The Monster Squad.”

Meanwhile back on campus, Brad blames the guys for planting a headless dead guy on his girlfriend’s lawn. When Cindy, who believes the boys have nothing to do with it, stands up for them, Brad kicks James’ leg, calls the boys chucklehead, and says Cindy is being a real downer. Brad then dumps Cindy by saying “That’s what I get for going with a psych major, isn’t it?”

Even Detective Cameron believes the boys when they say they had nothing to do with it. Cameron might be a grizzled veteran, but he has still seen and done some crazy shit in his day; when he admits to doing something he did in his past to Christopher it is quite possibly the funniest and most unsettling scene in the movie.

All this leads to a giant final showdown at the sorority house on the night of the formal. Since it is a pretty decent movie, I’m not going to give away the rest of the film, but I will say other than switching out the characters, “Slither” completely ripped off the climactic showdown against the zombies and parasites pretty much shot for shot.

In a way, the ending of this movie almost can’t be spoiled even if I tried since there are two different endings depending on what version you are able to track down. The theatrical and home video versions have a studio ordered re-shoot ending that Dekker absolutely abhors and wants nothing to do with. The television version, however, magically has the film’s true ending that was cut not only because the studio didn’t like it, but also because they didn’t want to spend any more money to finish the special effects needed to make the scene work properly. Having seen both endings, I have to disagree with Dekker. The ending he likes goes on for far too long for a payoff you can see coming a mile away. “Slither” relies so heavily on this movie that it even manages to craft it’s ending out of both of the endings to “Night of the Creeps.”

Plenty of movies have taken bits and pieces from “Nights of the Creeps,” and many of the writers and directors who have copped from this movie readily admit it. In addition to the aforementioned Williamson and Black, “Shaun of the Dead” creators Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg have referenced “Creeps.” Peter Jackson has also referenced “Creeps” in his gorier early work. So if such well known and respected filmmakers can admit Dekker was an influence, how could someone like James Gunn deny what he did when clearly the plot of his movie hinges on the exact same plot devices as “Night of the Creeps?”

Gunn probably thought he could get away with this slight because “Creeps” is a hard movie to track down unless you are looking for it. The film has never been released for three main reasons.

-The opening sequence has a lot of expensive copyrighted music that the film’s distributor, Sony-Tri-Star, doesn’t want to pay to keep in the film.

-Sony doesn’t seem to think it is popular enough to release it despite the fact that they released Dekker’s less popular (but equally good) “The Monster Squad.”

-Dekker detests the studio ending so much that he insists on having a director’s cut stand alongside the original version or the studio version scrapped entirely.

The efforts to get this film released on DVD are stronger than ever now thanks to recent sell out crowds at theatres in Austin, Los Angeles, and Toronto. Fans have even taken up a campaign of sending bricks to Sony Home Entertainment. Bricks have absolutely nothing to do with “Night of the Creeps,” but when asked by a fan what they should send Sony that would make a point Dekker said, “I dunno. Bricks? A brick would be kind of hard to ignore, wouldn’t it?”

Horror buffs and movie nerds in general, like myself, enjoy movies like “Night of the Creeps” because despite it’s outright failure at the box office (it still has yet to make back its modest $5 million budget), plenty of other filmmakers have made it into a movie that is almost essential viewing. Even if James Gunn is a complete liar, he managed to do more for this movie just by denying he ever saw it.

Verdict: Hidden Gem