Cast - Vic
Savage, Shannon O'Neil, William Thourlby, John Caresio
Director -
Vic Savage
Genre -
Sci-Fi, Horror
The next
movie on our list is a B/W budget ‘B’ movie from 1964 called ‘The Creeping
Terror’. It is another movie which has
featured on MST3K, but as I have not seen this episode, I know very little else
about the film.
A quick read
of The Creeping Terror IMDb and Wikipedia page and there are some fairly
interesting facts about the movie.
Firstly, the
opening credits were done by Richard Edlund.
He would go on to work on visual effects for movies such as Star Wars (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Ghostbusters (1984). However, he was also visual effects supervisor for our #67 movie Leonard Part 6 (1987), (see blog here), so actually his name is not
a guarantee of quality!
Secondly,
the ‘actors’ in the movie were mainly investors who thought they were buying
themselves onto the Hollywood gravy train.
Based on the other reviews I have read about this movie, I think it is
fair to say they missed the train and never saw their money again….
And lastly,
the movie is written by Robert Silliphant who also wrote another movie on our list, #50 The
Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies (1964),
(see blog here). This is when the alarm
bells started to ring in my head as this movie is only good for filling up
minimum word counts on reviews and looking smart to your friends if you can
remember the whole title. It is a slow
boring yawnfest of a movie and the thought of another ‘masterpiece’ from this
guy feels me with dread.
Surely lightning
couldn’t strike twice? It was time to
take a deep breath and find out…..
Deputy
Martin Gordon, (Vic Savage), on hearing that one of his relatives makes an
excellent rice dice, is on his way to see Uncle Ben. En route he discovers
a spaceship which has crash landed, (and which looks in no way similar to the
spaceship which is depicted in the opening credits / scenes!).
Unbeknownst
to Deputy Gordon, from the spaceship a creature who resembles a drunk carpet
salesman who is covered in super glue and has rolled around in most of his
stock has emerged and descended into Angel County. An equally ridiculous monster is still in the
spaceship, but is tied up and locked in the broom cupboard, (a stag do gone a
bit awry?).
Uncle Ben,
who also happens to be the local sheriff, decides to go into the spaceship to
investigate. He is promptly killed by
the alien, (who incidentally looks like he has fallen asleep in a pile of
vacuum cleaner nozzles).
Martin is made
temporary sheriff and recruits the help of scientist Dr. Bradford, (William
Thourlby) and Col. James Caldwell, (John Caresio), to try to work out a
way to defeat the bad Chinese dragon lookalike creature.
But the team
are not off to a good start as the alien begins gobbling up the local
residents. He nom nom’s some people at a
picnic, (who didn’t look like they were having fun anyway and so probably did
them a favour), chomps down some people who were doing some very bad dancing to
some very bad music in a very badly lit hall and has a nibble on Grandpa Brown, (Jack King), and his grandson Bobby Bobbieeee Bobbahhhh Barbbbbahhhh, (I think that’s his
name, at least this is the name Grandpa calls out whilst looking for him).
Somehow and
in some way, (I really can’t remember as I was nodding off by this point), Dr.
Bradford discovers that actually this creature was not mindlessly gulping up
local residents, but was in actual fact consuming them to analyse biological
make-up which it then somehow transmitted back to the spaceship who then sent a
signal back to their home planet. They
are analysing us not using us as a tasty alternative to Pot Noddle……
What does
this discovery mean for the human race?
How will Gordon and his crew stop the crawling monster? And what happened to good old fashioned anal
probing?
Watch The
Creeping Terror and find out!
On paper
this is one of those movies that should be so bad it becomes good. It has bad acting, a cheesy script, a poor
monster costume, shonky special effects and the sound is so bad it feels like
it was recorded next to a boiling kettle.
But for some reason it does not work and there is nothing about this
movie I like.
Let’s start
with the elephant in the room or rather the very bad creature costume in the
room. It’s dreadful, shocking; simply
awful! It looks like someone has fallen
asleep under a pile of coats, has woken up and can’t get the coats off. It looks like a very bad caterpillar costume
cobbled together by a 10 year old for their science project. It looks like Dougal from the Magic
Roundabout on Meth…..
……..it looks
like many things, but it does not look in anyway like a scary alien!
This is not
helped by the fact you can see the guy in the costume’s shoes at various points
throughout the movie. Nor is it helped
by the fact that, (certainly for the first victim), it is clear that the
creature is not eating his victims, but that the victims are climbing willingly
into its mouth!
Then there’s
also the fact that the creature can be outrun by an asthmatic fat bloke on a
mobility scooter. This leads to possibly
the biggest plot hole in the entire movie; Why the hell don’t the ‘victims’
just run away? Walk away? Or even crawl away very slowly?
Nearly all
of them could have escaped and with time to spare. A slight tweak of the script and this could
have been avoided. Maybe the alien has
some sort of tractor beam?
Telepathic power which stops his victims wanting to run away? Omits a strange pulse sound which paralyses
the victim? Honestly, if a drunken bloke
writing a crap blog full of toilet humour can think of a way out of it, surely
some Hollywood writers could have done the same or better?
This maybe
because most of the people who took part in this were not established Hollywood
people, but wannabes, hoping for a fast track into the big leagues. The movie definitely has an amateur feel
about it and all I can say about the ‘actors’ who paid to be in the film is
that I would have happily paid double for them to never appear in any movie
ever again.
All the
usual bad acting traits are there, mumbled lines, pregnant pauses, looking
lost, confused looks, climbing into a bad alien costume’s mouth, it’s all
there. But it’s hard to get a full
flavour of just how bad they are because for the majority of the movie a
narrator speaks over the actors! This is
a little bit annoying to say the least!
Just as a
character is about to explain a plot point, (not many, I grant you), their
voice is faded out and an authoritative voice narrates over them and moves the
story along. This gives the movie a feeling
of a 1950’s government educational film.
Many of these films are annoying after 5 mins, so keeping the audience
hooked for 90 mins was always going to be a challenge!
Wikipedia
explains that the original audio tapes were lost or destroyed and that they
couldn’t get the cast back to re-record their audio. To get over this Savage hired a local newsman
as a narrator. Whilst this explains the
strange way in which the actors are spoken over, it does not explain why the
soundtrack sounds like someone trying to swat a fly on a Hammond Organ.
At the top
of the blog I mentioned that this movie was written by Robert Silliphant who also
wrote the dull The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became
Mixed-up Zombies. So did lightning
strike twice? Unfortunately yes, this
was another slow boring yawnfest of a movie
I really
wanted to like this movie, it did have the right ingredients; the costume is
awful, the script is bad, the acting poor and the narration is weird, but it
just lacks any warmth or charm. The
overall experience is one of disappointment and boredom.
So my
advise, I’m afraid, is to avoid this film at all costs! Fortunately, dear reader, this won’t be difficult,
as it moves along about as fast as the stupid creeping creature does……
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