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.

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!!

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!

I figured that this movie got a lot of its "10" ratings from the MST3K version, but this is without question, the WORST movie I have ever seen. The voice-over play-by-play while a conversation is going on is hilarious!! The advice on married life (Officer "Third Wheel"), the cowardly boyfriend, and the lack of footspeed or common sense that the victims implore are memorable moments. And of course, the monster itself....an overgrown carpet sample!! Wow. My favorite scene: the bad edit of the couple's momentum after they slam on the brakes. Absolutely atrocious.