The Creeping Terror

...and that certainly isn't saying much. Interplanetary monster devours people who are too stupid to run away. Like BEACH GIRLS AND THE MONSTER, and unlike PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE, it's too annoying to be entertaining. To add to the sheer stupidity, half of it is narrated, just because some lunkhead lost the sound equipment. Not a total loss, however. The most entertaining aspect of this movie are the negative reviews trashing this movie on IMDb.

Now that's entertainment!

Rating: A redundant 0 out of *****

There are some movies that insult your intelligence, that present you with inane dialogue, bad direction, non-existent plots, and sloppy acting. Some movies contain one or more of these factors...some contain all of them in varying degrees. But in The Creeping Terror, each factor is included and ramped up to a Spinal Tap 11. The Creeping Terror is the worst movie I have ever seen. It takes badness to a level I had previously thought unattainable. Motion pictures of this anti-calibre (Manos: The Hands Of Fate is another example, and even THAT is better than this ultra-turkey) are so mind-bendingly awful they achieve a kind of transcendent brilliance that is impossible to describe in words. It takes real effort to make a movie this bad, folks. Anyway, the 'plot'. Reversed stock footage of an ICBM or Mercury rocket crashlands in Angel County, California, and disgorges a hideous man-eating creature that resembles a squashed fish finger with a camo print bridal train. The pantomime meance crawls with painful slowness about the countryside, killing people by somehow encouraging them to not run away and actually force themselves into its' bottomless gullet. As the alien snacks on the populace, the government tries to keep the threat under wraps, while assigning a scientist who is younger than one might think, an army commander with a troop of six men and a newly-wed deputy sheriff to combat the invasion. Legend has it that most (if not all) of the soundtrack of The Creeping Terror was lost after shooting was completed, and if this is true, then the loss was a truly inspired accident. In the place of 99% of the dialogue, we get *incredibly* earnest narration. Narration that swerves giddily off-topic at any moment, mind you. For instance, in the midst of the non-action, the voiceover guy and the movie stop to deliver a bizarre homily on the virtues of marriage. This is accompanied by a scene where the deputy and his new bride make out like demons in front of the former's pal. Creepy is an apt word, especially with a title like this movie has. Voiceover Guy keeps you amused as the flick staggers through its' short-but-interminable duration, detailing what our heroes are discussing as they mouth the words. Some events that need explanation are not narrated, others that do not are. There's no pattern to the use of voiceiver, any more than there is a pattern to the plot. But it gets worse. Who can go past the thermometer scene, in which a soon-to-be-eaten mother takes her baby's temperature THAT way? Thankfully, the act is implied rather than shown, but one must wonder what the scriptwriter was thinking...or on...when he wrote that part. 50s and 60s monster flicks always have some sort of sexual moral on show, and Terror is no exception. Most of the carpet monster's victims are eaten while they're necking. Or dancing. Yes, the hysterically drawn-out jive dance massacre near the end of the film (which comes complete with irrelevant greaser fistfight) shows us clearly that if you're going to boogie on down to the devil's music in the mid-60s, you should fully expect to be consumed by a panto slug from Venus. There are so many fantastically awful bits in the movie I could mention...the death of Fat Grandpa, the anti-tree rage attack said fat person's grandson has shortly before the slaying, the tootling music that replaces sound for most of the movie's last third, the scenes where the army guys pretend to fire their toy guns at the alien...and the truly demented scene where the deputy sheriff ineffectually beats the control panels of the UFO with his gun...and later a steel pipe... for an uninterrupted two minutes without the slightest success. The concluding narration, where Dr Bradford's hope for the future of Humanity is detailed by the narrator, rivals or beats any of the crazy speeches in the films of Russ Meyer or Ed Wood. Students of fetishism may see some significance in the way the director lingers on shots of female legs sticking out of the alien's mouth. Demented beyond words, this is a Grade AAAA+ ultrabomb that makes Plan From Outer Space look like Dawn Of The Dead. Lovers of bad cinema must see it! There is NO film worse, trust me. Oh, and I must add that the deputy sheriff's wife's exceptional beauty makes me wonder why *this* was the best movie she could manage to get signed on for.

What really sets this movie apart from other bad films is the makers' utter lack of embarrassment at the disastrous technical execution of the film. It isn't just that the monster is an old carpet, the exterior of the spaceship appears to be a garage door, and the editing is so incongruous it seems almost abstract. These shameless idiots actually lost or destroyed or never made a soundtrack, so they substituted bad narration (complete with weird pseudo-psychological non-sequitor explanations of characters' motivations), random dubbing of snatches of dialogue ("My god! What is it?"), even more random music (startlingly awful music) and under-mixed sound effects. You must see it. It's so bad it commands your attention, but the pacing is so slow it can only really be watched in fast forward.

There was only one possible reason for this movie to be made and that was to see women's rears stuck up into the air as they went down the monster's gullet. Just to keep from being called a pervert, the director tosses the monster some male actors and extras he didn't want to pay. Monster ? It's a living shag rug with several other dirty shag rugs sewn together. At one point, it even snags on a car and the "puppeteers and victims" inside have to hump a car to get freed. In fact, you know its going to be a bad movie because it requires a narrator to explain what's going on as you watch it. Actually, the narration is supposed to cover up a lost soundtrack; any sane director would have called it off at that point. The "attacks" are pretty ridiculous; the thing moves so slow that everyone has well enough time to run, and it makes so much noise there's no way it can sneak up on you. These people want to be eaten so the monster dutifully obliges. This movie may have been made just to show off the rolling hills and scenery of Lake Tahoe where it was filmed. After this movie, you'd think no one would ever go there again.

Where else but in the good ole U.S.A. could a group of people make a movie like THE CREEPING TERROR, get it shown in theatres and on TV (repeatedly), and people admit to liking it publicly? I've loved this flick since the first time I saw it back in the 70's on late night TV and still hold it in high regard as one of the worst movies I will ever love. The carpet and vacuum hose monster that moves at a mall walkers pace seems to have no problem getting victims to into it's mouth, not just to be eaten but to be analyzed and biological info sent back to it's home planet?!? A.J. Nelson must have been dropped one too many times as a baby to make something this bad... and hilarious!