A horror fan without humor is like a slasher film without blood: why bother? Humor goes hand in hand with fear. When we become nervous, thanks to unrelenting tension, we laugh, just like when we’re right on the edge of losing our minds to terror, we laugh (a bray of laughter, as one famous author might say).When we’re faced with blood and guts, we vomit in our mouths a little, sure, and then we laugh—not a pretty sight, exactly, but who cares? There is nothing more boring than a person who’s serious all the time, and there’s nothing more serious than a boring slasher film—except maybe a serious horror fan watching a serious slasher film without blood. That might be most boring of all.
Enter the opposite: Night of the Creeps (1986), a film written directed by Fred Dekker (who I learned wrote for Star Trek: Enterprise, too), is a slasher film with plenty of blood. It’s also a comedy. It’s got camp, straight humor, and moments of tension and gore that will make you laugh out loud, or go, “Ew, gross, seriously?” as my wife may or may not have done. This movie is meant to be a ‘B-Movie’, of course, but what I love about it is that it’s a lot of great fun.
The reason I had so much fun watching it has to do with the way the movie touches on, not just Horror, but genres like Science Fiction and Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction, as well as Mystery. There are tropes all over the place, but here are a few of my favorites:
Right away, you’re introduced to naked, midget sized aliens speaking a different language (though we are granted subtitles in both alien writing and our own English, thankfully) and running around their spaceship shooting at one another with ray-guns. These guys make Storm Troopers look like Russel Crowe’s version of Robin Hood, and, because of this, one alien achieves its goal: to jettison a science experiment right out into space. And where should that experiment end up but America, circa 1959. That experiment becomes the gift that keeps on giving, so to speak.
I mean, what the hell, right?
Whatever else you might be thinking, it gets better. The experiment produces these slugs that grow inside the human head and then burst out of it once full-grown. We’re talking The Puppet Masters meets Alien, here, folks, with just a dash of The Night of the Living Dead, because while the slugs are incubating (eating brains?), what could the human hosts become but … zombies!
Finally, my favorite trope has to do with the detective who is always one step behind the bad guys in this film. He’s an old-school detective, with great pulp-lines like, “Thrill me,” –he drinks way to much, and if you look close, he has a Dashiell Hammett book (The Maltese Falcon?) sitting just behind his chair. There are also some great detective pulp magazines on his desk. You can’t beat that!
There’s a little bit here for everyone—the laughs are non-stop—and, believe me, there is plenty of blood and gore and nasty, decaying faces stretched overtop skulls; just in case you’re a fan of humor and horror and not at all too serious.
Review by David M. Wilson
Enter the opposite: Night of the Creeps (1986), a film written directed by Fred Dekker (who I learned wrote for Star Trek: Enterprise, too), is a slasher film with plenty of blood. It’s also a comedy. It’s got camp, straight humor, and moments of tension and gore that will make you laugh out loud, or go, “Ew, gross, seriously?” as my wife may or may not have done. This movie is meant to be a ‘B-Movie’, of course, but what I love about it is that it’s a lot of great fun.
The reason I had so much fun watching it has to do with the way the movie touches on, not just Horror, but genres like Science Fiction and Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction, as well as Mystery. There are tropes all over the place, but here are a few of my favorites:
Right away, you’re introduced to naked, midget sized aliens speaking a different language (though we are granted subtitles in both alien writing and our own English, thankfully) and running around their spaceship shooting at one another with ray-guns. These guys make Storm Troopers look like Russel Crowe’s version of Robin Hood, and, because of this, one alien achieves its goal: to jettison a science experiment right out into space. And where should that experiment end up but America, circa 1959. That experiment becomes the gift that keeps on giving, so to speak.
I mean, what the hell, right?
Whatever else you might be thinking, it gets better. The experiment produces these slugs that grow inside the human head and then burst out of it once full-grown. We’re talking The Puppet Masters meets Alien, here, folks, with just a dash of The Night of the Living Dead, because while the slugs are incubating (eating brains?), what could the human hosts become but … zombies!
Finally, my favorite trope has to do with the detective who is always one step behind the bad guys in this film. He’s an old-school detective, with great pulp-lines like, “Thrill me,” –he drinks way to much, and if you look close, he has a Dashiell Hammett book (The Maltese Falcon?) sitting just behind his chair. There are also some great detective pulp magazines on his desk. You can’t beat that!
There’s a little bit here for everyone—the laughs are non-stop—and, believe me, there is plenty of blood and gore and nasty, decaying faces stretched overtop skulls; just in case you’re a fan of humor and horror and not at all too serious.
Review by David M. Wilson
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