Tom Atkins has been in so many movies I have watched over the years, but Night of the Creeps was never on my radar. I think it just crept into my top 10.
As an alien spacecraft streaks through the cosmos, the crew (?) is engaged in a full-on chase and shootout. One of the short, naked, weirdly deformed though somewhat humanoid creatures clearly is trying to escape with a container that the others want back. They race through the belly of the ship until the escapee is cornered. Apparently, knowing that it is at its end, they jettison the container into space. Sending it spinning into the vast unknown.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, it’s the late 1950s. On the campus of the small town college of “Corman University,” a group of female students gets ready for their dates. As they are prepping and pampering themselves one of the dates arrives outside as his radio blares a message about an escaped mental patient. Paying it no mind, the date gets out picks up his best girl, and drives off to (let’s just call it) Make Out Point. While they are there, with a few of the other cars on dates, a bright ball of fire zooms over their heads and crashes in the woods.
Flash forward to 1988 and the same college is prepping for a big dance. Two students James Carpenter (J.C.) Hooper and Chris Romero are walking down frat row and Chris is taken aback by one of the girls he spots across the street, Cindy Cronenberg. Chris figures the only way to get the girl is to join a frat. When he and J.C. say they want to pledge the current frat brothers send them out to find a cadaver and prank a rival fraternity. What they find during this prank changes their lives, and the lives of those around them, forever.
Oddly, or maybe not considering my viewing habits, I first heard about this movie from an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Jonah and the bots are dressing up for Halloween and Jonah is dressed as Tom Atkins. No one knows who he is and he spouts off a bunch of Atkins’ movies (“Halloween 3, The Fog, Night of the Creeps) to prove that they should all know him. ANYWAY, as I said, I have seen a bunch of his films but not this one. I am certainly glad that I have now, though.
Atkins plays the perfect grizzled police detective in a small town, haunted by his past. The man carries this movie from start to finish. Whether it is calling everyone weird names, or spouting one-liners and puns, to his (I guess famous) opening line to every conversation “Thrill me.” Had this just been a movie that followed his career until this point in his life, I would have gladly watched it. No one else’s performance comes close.
Aside from the great bit of work that Tom Atkins puts in here, the rest of the movie is worth seeing as well. It’s got the usual prerequisite 1980s horror movie tropes. Kids messing around, drinking, boobs, blood, and more than a few corny jokes. It’s weird however that at the core of Atkins’s character motivation is him making amends for what he did as a young patrolman. It doesn’t dwell on it long enough to get in the way of the shotgun blasts and burning folks with a World War II flame thrower that the police just happen to have in their arsenal, but it’s there.
This is maybe the most quintessential “background movie” I have seen in a while. I don’t want to undersell the film as being boring and something you don’t need to pay much attention to. It is a great movie and one I am bummed I didn’t watch until now. It’s just one that isn’t hard to follow and is filled with lots of fun nonsense people can check in with here and there to give them a good laugh or even a knowing groan. I will certainly add this to the rotation of other “comfort” movies with films like Bloodsport, Goonies, Big Trouble in Little China and Friday the 13th Part 6.
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