the audience applauded

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Space slugs that eat brains and turn humans into zombies on a college campus. Tom Atkins playing a weathered veteran detective with some great one liners. Sprinkle a ton of 80's all over this movie and you have Night of the Creeps.I have no clue how I have not seen this movie before. The way it combines zombie, slashers, alien invasion/body snatching movies along with some great humor was a blast. I can't remember having ever seen a science fiction/horror/comedy movie before and as odd as it sounds it works incredibly well.After checking it out on Shudder I will definitely be picking up the Blu-ray and revisiting this 80's nostalgia filled gem.

Pulling a prank for pledge night, a pair of wannabe fraternity members sneak into a cryogenic lab and attempt to bring a corpse back to campus and learn the body contained an alien parasite that is infesting the school and must race to stop them from spreading.This here is one of the more enjoyable and entertaining efforts of the genre. A lot of what works here is the fact fact that the film is quite goofy and silly yet has plenty of fun with itself during that time. The sarcastic-ness of many people in this film was a very nice touch towards this, treating the situation as gravelly serious as to the repercussions and intentions of the creatures yet still have situations where people were moronic and someone insults them to put them in their place. It was good to see this happening instead of the usual jokes about the corniness of the situation comparing it all to a classic horror movie like what usually be expected in such a situation. There's still the other fun action scenes here that play up the inherently silly premise here, from the original flashback at the start showing the aliens landing on Earth and the eventual encounter with the teens, the early scenes of the creatures getting loose and engaging in their zombie-like shuffling around campus to the inconspicuous others around them and the incredibly fun set-ups that come into play here for the finale as the different groups led into the attack are given their conversion and prepare for the overall suspenseful final that is much higher than expected for a movie like this. Once all the creatures come out of the woodwork, there are jumps piled up on top of jumps in tons of great scenes from the two trapped inside the tool-shed, the fight inside the sorority house's main living room and the fights that go on outside holding them off. Taking the goofy level out of the film in exchange for full-on action is a great ploy that still overall features them fighting off mutant slugs emerging from zombified bodies and it's a lot of fun. Coupled with the great gore here in addition to the usual bodily mutilations, but we also see different stages of after- effects as we also get to see some very well done human heads exploding and several bodies that have been decayed and rotting moving around and the great make-up for the creatures, there's plenty to like about this one while there's only a few minor flaws. The main problem here is that the opening of the film, which was filmed in black & white, was a total irritation. It never really made the film scarier, except for one scene with the high suspense. It was nice and fresh approach to film the scene like that, but it never served the film much importance. There's also the small fact that the slugs were a little too obviously fake, as they really did look like they were small puppets being pulled around on strings, but at least the strings were hard to see on film which was a plus. As well, the film's long beginning to get the creatures loose tends to get a little meandering with a lot of build-up before they get released and it's a long stretch before something happens so the pacing is a little off. Otherwise, this one had a lot of really enjoyable elements.Rated R: Graphic Violence, Language, Nudity, and the after effects of violence towards animals.

I grew up in the 1980's and it was not until between 5-10 years ago that I became aware of writer/director Fred Dekker's debut classic Night Of The Creeps. Better late than never, but what matters is that I do enjoy it. The film is Dekker's homage of all kinds of horror, fantasy and science fiction. Night Of The Creeps is a great blend of campy horror, 50's sci fi and John Hughes style 80's teen comedies. Night Of The Creeps blends these genres easily and this film is a whole lot of campy, lighthearted fun. Rusty(from National Lampoon's Vacation movies) is a college nerd with one friend, who is crippled. However, he is witty, smart and more uninhibited than his shy buddy. He then goes out of his way to help his introverted pal score with the sorority chick he is afraid to talk to. This brings our heroes to fraternity membership, which leads to the thawing out of a cryogenically frozen corpse that is infested by alien slugs that turn people into zombies. This is where Tom Atkins shows up as a hard boiled detective. Tom Atkins performance is a highlight of the film and as action hero Atkins is awesome. His performance and presence greatly enhance the film, plus he has an incredibly stylish and manly moustache. Night Of The Creeps is tongue in cheek, action packed and funny horror flick. It has good performances, direction, f/x and lots of memorable 80's one liners. Night Of The Creeps is a lot of fun and not one to be missed.

Though something of a highly regarded cult item today, Fred Dekker's first film, "Night of the Creeps," was an unqualified flop when first released in August 1986, only recouping a little more than 1/10 of its $5 million budget. A highly amusing yet genuinely jolting mixture of comedy and horror, the film combined any number of disparate genres--the zombie film, the alien invasion film, the depressed/suicidal cop-seeking-redemption film, the frat house comedy--into one highly satisfying stew, and yet, for some reason, failed to find its audience at the box office. With the advantage of hindsight, however, and in no small part thanks to the advent of the DVD revolution, "Night of the Creeps," like many of its primary and secondary characters, is enjoying a very vigorous second life after having arisen from limbo, and is today appreciated for the highly entertaining, modest piece of work that it is.The opening sequences of the film are perhaps the best. The viewer is treated to a pitched battle aboard an alien spaceship, during which one of the diminutive ETs manages to jettison a canister of...something, which promptly plummets down to planet Earth, in the year 1959. Although the entire film can be regarded as a pastiche of and homage to the sci-fi "B movies" of the 1950s, the next sequence, filmed in B&W, is especially reminiscent. In a scene straight out of "The Blob," two necking teenagers see a streaking meteor fall to the ground, and go to investigate. The male youth, Johnny, is attacked by something from the fallen canister, while his poor galpal, nervously waiting back at the car, is hacked to bits by an escaped ax murderer. Flash forward 27 years, to 1986, when we meet two college students, Chris (Jason Lively, who had appeared in "European Vacation" the year before) and J.C. (Steve Marshall), his handicapped best friend. When Chris develops an instantaneous crush on sorority girl Cynthia (Jill Whitlow), the pair decides that the only way to impress the young hottie is for the two of them to apply to the superhip Beta fraternity. The two break into a cryogenics lab in order to purloin a cadaver, as part of their hazing ordeal, but when the corpsicle suddenly comes to life, the two youths flee in fear. Too late, however. Before long, the awakened cadaver--soon revealed to be Johnny himself--begins to lumber around campus, and even worse...his body soon disgorges a swarm of scuttling, sluglike creatures, which only serve to spread the zombie contagion even further....Fans of so-called B movies will especially enjoy all the cinematic and directorial references with which writer/director Dekker has filled his movie. The bulk of the film transpires at Corman University, and Chris', J.C.'s and Cynthia's surnames are, respectively, Romero, Carpenter Hooper and Cronenberg! Four of the detective sergeants on the zombie case are named Dante, De Palma, Landis and Raimi (Raimi is played by Bruce Solomon, who many will recall as another sergeant, Sgt. Dennis Foley, on TV's "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman"), while veteran character actor Tom Atkins (who many will recognize from such films as John Carpenter's "The Fog" and "Escape From New York," as well as from "Lethal Weapon") plays that depressed/suicidal head detective previously mentioned, a character named Cameron. And if all these wonderful wink-wink mentions aren't enough, one of the zombie victims in the film is shown watching the Ed Wood classic "Plan 9 From Outer Space" on TV, and B-movie legend Dick Miller pops up in a very amusing cameo, playing a police armorer. The film contains any number of memorable scenes, and the one in which the crippled J.C. is trapped in a bathroom with a swarm of the scurrying "creeps" should do for toilet stalls what "Psycho" did for showers and "Jaws" did for the beach. Those creeps, by the way, should really strike a chord in anyone who has ever been startled by a mouse or water bug speeding through his or her apartment or between their legs. Zippy as a rodent yet undeniably sluglike, they are memorable horror creations indeed. And in a film with consistently ingratiating performances from its largely "no-name" cast, Atkins really does shine, and gets to deliver the lion's share of the picture's best lines. His constantly repeated refrain, "Thrill me," should have become some kind of cinematic catchphrase, on the order of Dirty Harry's "Make my day" (Dekker, in one of the deluxe DVD's copious extras, reveals that it was this line, which came to him as he slept, that served as the basis for the entire rest of the film), but is just one of a dozen great others that Det. Cameron amusingly grates during the course of his job here. "A smart, audacious film" says author Glenn Kay while describing "Night of the Creeps" in his "Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide," and darn, if that isn't ever the truth! Dekker, over the course of the next six years, would go on to direct "Monster Squad" and, um, "RoboCop 3," neither of which this viewer has seen. Still, I very much doubt if either of those films provides such a deft balancing act of chills and laughs as does "Night of the Creeps." The film is an unexpected winner from beginning to end (this viewer prefers the director's cut, by the way, with its returning-spaceship finale), and might leave you open mouthed with surprise. Better to tape that mouth shut, hence, in order to prevent an entry point for any of those darn creeps!