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!!

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.

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.

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.

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!