Release Date: 1964
Budget: Not very much (not an exact figure)
There is one thing that has been bothering me about Plan 9 and now about The Creeping Terror: do these 60's drive-in catastrophes get special treatment because they didn't have the resources or technology of Showgirls and Troll 2? After much thought, I have decided they should not and that all of these movies should be viewed "as is" without consideration for when they were made. I am confident that the Creeping Terror would've sucked regardless of what resources it had at its disposal. Now, on to the movie:
The basic premise of The Creeping Terror is that Martin Gordon is trying to become the new sheriff in his small home town, but his first challenge is a big one: a banana shape rocket lands in the woods and unleashes a shag-carpet monster who very, very, very slowly goes around town eating everyone. It is unfortunate for Martin that his town has the slowest collection of people in the country, otherwise they would all still be alive. Martin, and his rag tag "army", spend the rest of the movie pathetically trying to save the town. Even the plot of The Creeping Terror is tired and boring; at least the first three and a half movies I've watched has SOME originality in their plot, albeit retarded originality.
One of the first things you'll notice about The Creeping Terror is that it is narrated by the same guy who narrated every single 1950's junior high instructional video (or seemingly so). Whenever the audio obviously doesn't match or, more than likely, they weren't able to capture it with their awesome filming skills, Mr. Narrator jumps in to tell us what's happening. Since the filming of this thing is SOOOOO bad.. we hear a lot from Mr. Narrator: like 60-70% of the audio in fact.
In addition to the terrible monster, awful plot, poor sound, and terrible acting, The Creeping Terror suffers in a lot of other ways. First, the cinematography is terrible. If I had to guess, I would have said this was filmed between 1917 to 1922. Nope, 1964. Second, the background music and sounds are extremely repetitive and sound as if they all come from the same guy jumping back and forth between a church organ and a bongo drum while making all of the monster noises and townspeople screams. Finally, the ending is completely ridiculous, but I'm not going to tell you how it ends because I want you to see it for yourself.
Some of the best (read "awful") scenes of The Creeping Terror are:
1. A film of a very earthly rocket shown in reverse is used for the landing of the alien ship. That same ship shows up one scene later but looks suspiciously like a banana and not so much like a rocket.
2. The first time you see the Creeping Terror it becomes blatantly obvious how much this movie really is going to suck. It looks like scraps of blankets and carpeting, taped together, and draped over a small man.
3. The banana ship has intricate buttons and controls. To mind, it'd be tough for a rug to operate a complicated space ship... just sayin'.
4. There is a sock-hop dance scene about two thirds of the way through the movie that is classic. Despite their apparent physical aptitude to dance the night away, none of the dancers are able to run the 1.5mph required to get away from The Creeping Terror. Idiots.
5. Mr. Narrator announces a "hootenanny", which I was pretty excited to see because I love a good hootenanny, but said hootenanny ended up being more like a Sunday school sing-along in a field. To punish these people for pretending to be a hootenanny, The Creeping Terror eats them all.
I give The Creeping Terror a final rating of -10. I can maybe see another movie being as bad as The Creeping Terror, and at that point I'll have to re-review them to determine a winner, but no movie ever, for the rest of history, will be significantly worse than The Creeping Terror. It sucks on every single level and is every bit deserving of this amazing rating.
P.S. I own The Creeping Terror if you want to borrow it.
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