#41 The Creeping Terror (Wes)

The Creeping Terror

If you’ve read any of our reviews, then you’ll know that generally the films that we have enjoyed the most are the old classic B movies. Some were familiar favourites (eg Plan 9 From Outer Space – see here), whilst some were new to us (eg Robot Monster – see here). Our next movie, The Creeping Terror, was a movie I know I’d seen years ago, but for some reason I confused it with From Hell It Came. So if this wasn’t the movie with the killer tree stump monster thing I fondly remembered, what was so bad that had my memory suppress it from me?

As Deputy Martin Gordon (Vic Savage – who also directed under the name AJ Nelson) returns from his honeymoon, he joins the Sheriff (Byrd Holland) to look at an alien ship that has crashed in Angel County, CA. The sheriff enters the ship and is heard being killed. Gordon calls for help and the military arrive who soon discover a slug-like monster inside which fortunately for them is chained to the wall. However another monster has left the ship shortly before and is now stalking the countryside. This goes on a murderous rampage eating several people (I say eating, they seem more to slowly climb into the monsters mouth), including attacking dozens of people at a dance and culminating with it attacking the cars and people parked in Lovers Lane (where it looks like it’s just humping the cars). After eventually realising that these monsters need to be destroyed the military finally decide to act. Will they be able to stop these creatures? Or at the very least slow them down (even more)?

When it’s written down like that, it sounds like quite a fun, quirky movie. Unfortunately the story itself could have been told in an episode of The Twilight Zone (25 mins) just as well. The movie has a short running time (75 mins), but it’s so badly paced that it drags along more than a dog with worms. The majority of this is due to the extremely slow pace of the monster, but even without that, there are a lot of drawn out pointless scenes and shots. I think the best way to really illustrate that, is to do the same I did for Gigli (see here), and share some of the tweets from when I originally watched this (Follow us for our tweet-a-longs here and here):

“Let’s show 20 seconds of empty scrubland, that’ll thrill the viewer”

“It’s ok, you have time to finish hanging the laundry, do the dishes, watch Roots, and make dinner before the monster gets you”

“I know how we can make this movie faster paced. Fishing! Maybe we’ll add some test match cricket later too!”

“Hootenannys were less hoot and more nanny back in 1964…”

“Quick the monster is coming! We’ve only time for this dance, the one next week and our spring formal until it gets here!”

“We’re in cars and this monster moves more slowly than the second season of The Walking Dead, how will we escape?”

“Someone actually RUNS in this movie and the first thing they do is remark on it and then follow him. No wonder nobody else ran.”

Of course the clue to all of this may lie in the title The Creeping Terror, which I’ll grant you does hint at what you’re about to watch. However there’s a major difference between creeping, and moving so slowly you make the line in the Post Office seem like the 100m sprint. You only have to watch the horror movie It Follows to understand the tension and fear that can be created by a slow, but unstopping monster. However the monster in this movie just moves too slowly to even create the slightest air of menace and relies solely on its victims standing there screaming instead of casually sauntering away stopping only briefly to smell the flowers.

It isn’t just its slow pace that makes this one of the worst monsters ever to appear onscreen. I used the term “slug-like” in my synopsis mainly as that seems to be the most widely used term to describe it. In fact it’s quite a good term, it’s slow, and unpleasant, it even has a shape much like a giant slug (if somebody had balanced a venus flytrap made from old plumbing supplies on the slug, and then glued the slug onto a Chinese Dragon that had undergone an unfortunate steam roller accident), but there’s no getting around the fact that it’s a huge old rug. If you was to describe this monster as “rug-like” you’d be wrong, as I’m not joking in the slightest, IT’S A HUGE OLD RUG. It’s the monster from When Living Room Furniture Goes Bad. If only somebody thought to put the monster over a washing line and beat it with a large paddle all of this horror could have been averted…

Due to problems with the sound (either the soundtrack was lost, or according to William Thourlby the film was shot without sound to cut costs, with the intention of over-dubbing later) much of the film is narrated by Larry Burrell, including what the characters are saying to each other, whilst at the same time you can see the actors actually talking to each other. This really added to the sheer ridiculousness of the movie, making it feel like you’re watching a movie with an elderly relative who’s telling you what’s happening onscreen as you’re both watching it (this has happened to me in real life). It’s honestly one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen in a movie, and can once again be best summed up with my tweets from the viewing:

“The actors couldn’t show amazement, so the narrator tells us they’re amazed instead… Brilliant.”

“Why won’t they let the actors speak? This is like watching an audio book with added moving pictures.”

“I wish the narrator would just tell us people danced really badly instead of making us have to watch it.”

If I’m being honest, I both loved and hated this movie. The sheer bizarreness of a narrator describing everything, coupled with one of the most pathetic monsters ever committed to celluloid should make for a great movie. Unfortunately the pacing is the thing that ultimately lets it down, and that’s a real shame. Then again it may be that I’m just bitter that this wasn’t made in the Soviet Union, and then I could have ended my review with one last tweet… “In Soviet Russia, the rug munches you”

#41 The Creeping Terror (1964) (Colin)

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……