The Creeping Terror

The Creeping Terror, where to begin? If you thought Hal Warren, Jerry Warren, Larry Buchanan, Ed Wood or Coleman Francis were inept, well everyone let me introduce to you Art J. Nelson, director of this fun flick.

Dialogue? Well it's hard to find, we got a narrator instead who tell us what the actors are doing or talking about. It's important because you may not know what the actors are discussing about. Monster? Well steal a Chinese dragon from your local Chinatown community and glue carpet and shop vac hoses to it (don't forget a mouth hole) Hero? Well get the mutant offspring of Chris Isaac and KD Lang to be our hero. Choreography? Well your local high school teachers group are having a mid-afternoon dance (big band music with lots of horns and saxophones all re-created by two women playing a piano and drums)And don't forget the military who stole their younger siblings cap guns. Put em all together and you have all this complicated story of a monster who flies millions of light years across space.....to eat people. Look there been times when I've really been hungry for something that I don't have in the food pantry but I don't drive half way across the country just for a quick snack (which humans are for the monster since it can't seem to get full) But again I'm not a Chinese dragon.

The film seems to be easily found on DVD thanks to MST3K, no idea where to get the original version. Enjoy at your own risk!!

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.

...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 *****

Everything rotten you have read about this movie is true. The monster is a couple of cheap shag rugs with felt triangles stapled to it, and a performer underneath to make it move. There is no dialogue, just a narration that tries to make sense of the pictures, but merely makes everyone seem stupid. The print is grainy, although that might be a deliberate choice of the MST3000 crew. There is an attempt to raise some tension by showing some teenagers dancing at a party, intercut with the shag-rug monster moving. This implies, I suppose, that it's coming for them. The technique has not improved since before D.W. Griffith adopted it.

There's a strong tendency for people to rate movies like this 1 on the IMDB, because negative numbers are not available. I prefer to reserve that rating for misfires that are so bizarre that you can't help but watch, like a train wreck. Others will give it a 10 because it makes them feel superior, This is inept and dull.