CREEPIES

CREEPIES
By Ken Leicht

John Le Roy’s CREEPIES is definitely one of the best no budget cheese-indie comedy monster movies I’ve seen in a while. Drawing inspiration or just plain boldly stealing from several classic horror films, CREEPIES inspires with its bravado. Eric Spudic’s amusing script winks, tips its hat or just plain rips off every classic horror film in the past 50 years. It borrows liberally from everywhere but mostly from RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD. Just insert mutant spiders in place of zombies.

The story follows a group of soldiers at an experimental army facility which quickly loses control of its military spider project with devastating results. Meanwhile in nearby L.A. one of the missing spider containers turns up in a recording studio where two engineers accidentally unleash the horror inside. A girl group stumbles on to the scene and joins the engineers in their battle to survive.

Despite having the usual no budget, it sure has a lot of production value though the quality was all over the place. I was astonished by the not too far from Toho model and monster effects. Just after I would be surprised by the Godzilla meets Thunderbirds model work however, I would laugh my ass off at the weird digital spiders which seemed to alternate between being black widow-esque and looking like the low budget digital cousins of the Zanti Misfits. In this milieu the cheesy-ness adds to the comedy and is expected. But next to the fairly high quality model stuff, it was very jarring. But that just made it funnier.

Clever editing and shooting made it pretty hard to notice there was only maybe two (one?) locations. And the stolen news footage and helicopter shots (Easy to grab when you live in L.A….Just point at the sky and wait), blended in quite well. As far as the horror stuff, the gore effects and monster effects were quite effective. Guess that’s where what little money there was went. It surely didn’t go to set dressing. But it’s easy to let that slide given all the places the film succeeds.

Special mentions for all the referential sound cues (THEM’s ant sounds and the explosions and guns which I swear were from Space:1999 or some other British thing), a Ron Jeremy cameo and an amusing cheer up the troops speech which mentions the Rossington-Collins Band(!). Now that’s entertainment.