space the spooky frontierIt’s 1959 and a space ship is traveling across the galaxy. Two aliens on the ship are chasing a third that’s carrying a canister. Before they can stop him, the canister is launched out into space and at Earth where crashes in the woods. A young man and his lovely date see the crash and go to investigate. Meanwhile an escaped mental patient welding an axe is on the loose nearby. As the young man takes a look at the canister, a slug jumps into his mouth as his girlfriend is killed by the escaped patient.

27 years later (1986) Chris Romero (Jason Lively) and his disabled friend J.C. (Steve Marshall) have entered college. Chris falls in love with Cynthia (Jill Whitlow), who already has a boyfriend, but he tries to impress anyway by joining a fraternity. As part of their pledge they are ordered to go steal a corpse from the college’s medical centre and leave it on the front porch of a sorority house.

night-of-the-creepsChris and J.C. sneak into the medical centre but are unable to find the morgue. Instead they find the cryogenically frozen body of the kid from 1959 with the alien slug in his body. They release the corpse which quickly comes back to life and scares them out of the building. The frozen corpse walks to the sorority house where he picked up his date in 1959 and his head explodes releasing tons of alien slugs. Detective Cameron (Tom Atkins) is called in to investigate. Soon the slugs are jumping into people and Chris, J.C., Cynthia and Detective Cameron are forced to fight a wave of slug infected zombies.

Fred Dekker wrote and directed this cult film. Dekker would make another cult favourite The Monster Squad the following year. But not much more after that other than some TV work. Dekker went on to work on Tales from the Crypt and later write a few of episodes for Star Trek: Enterprise. Night of the Creeps is a fun gory little film. And this wouldn’t be the last time alien slugs invaded Earth.