Bad Movie Club: Creepozoids


1987 horror movie

Rating: 5/20 (Fred: 1/20; Josh: 5/20; Libby: 7/20; Ryan: didn't make it)

Plot: Survivors of World War III avoid some sort of acid rain situation by ducking into a seemingly abandoned warehouse only to discover it's occupied by some sort of creepozoid. That or the humans are actually the titular creepozoids in this. It was never all that clear to me.

This is a David DeCoteau joint, but there wasn't a single talking cat (?!?) in the thing. There was, however, a lot of similarities to Alien, enough that one could accuse DeCoteau of plagiarism. Of course, Alien had the ill-fitting underpants instead of the 1 1/2 shower scenes this one threw in, and there wasn't a killer baby. There's a possibility that I should have given you a [Spoiler Alert!] there because maybe the baby was supposed to be a surprise. Alien also had a lot fewer scenes that took place in shafts. I believe there were shafts in Alien, but the shaft in this movie got more screen time than Shaft did in Shaft. Creepozoids also doesn't take place on a claustrophobic spaceship. Instead, it takes place in a place where actors and actresses go to ruin their careers. Other than all that, this is pretty much Alien, right down to a disgustingly scary dinner scene although the nonsense in this one didn't really make any sense at all. One bad movie club member (a jockass) suggested that this reveals something about director DeCoteau, something about his fears of becoming a father, similar to what I've always suspected Eraserhead is really about but am likely wrong. If we want to psychoanalyze this, we should probably find better things to do, but there's definitely some interesting things going on here. You've got that shaft, characters returning to a womb, the whole baby thing, that shower scene, a catfight. I don't know what I'm even trying to say here because I distracted myself with visions of one of the most disturbing catfights you'll ever see. This has all the ingredients for an entertaining bad movie--terrible acting, grotesqueness, that shower scene I can't stop mentioning, a low budget, poor screenwriting--but it doesn't add up to anything that we haven't seen before. I was fond of multiple references to the creepozoid's fecal matter and one scene where he appears to urinate on a victim. And Linnea Quigley, the star of that aforementioned shower scene, has quite the scream on her. Quigley was the gal impaled on an antler in Silent Night, Deadly Night, and Bad Movie Club also apparently saw her in Dead Heat. There was also a male character who was a little louder than the other male characters and got the silliest lines. I didn't catch his name, but all the characters were interchangeable anyway. But this guy got to say "Let's hump it!" and "More than three shakes and you're wankin' it," both which show off that combination of genius writing and great performance. A halfway-decent looking alien thing, a grotesque baby with a very realistic umbilical cord, and a great early-80's score help keep this entertaining although it's not exactly a classic good-bad movie. Oh, and did I mention that there's a shower scene?

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