The Creeping Terror (1964)

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

A Disappointing Continuation

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Holy crap what did I just sit through? A tour-de-crap from Vic Savage, who produced, directed, and starred in this travesty. The story (like it matters) is about a newlywed sheriff and his bride trying to stop a carpet monster from outer space. The entire thing is narrated like a badly-written book. The narrator describes the scenes as we're watching them! What the hell was with the obsession with marriage vs bachelorhood? Talk about someone working out their issues through their "art." I felt like I just listened to Vic Savage's therapy sessions. The movie's budget must have been whatever Savage found in his couch cushions. The monster literally looks like pieces of carpet mixed with the contents of a garbage can draped over some people crawling along at a snail's pace. The awful sound effects they use when it's growling or gurgling or whatever will make your ears bleed. It is terrible in a way that defies belief but there is something fascinating about it. I must have shook my head and said "this must be a joke" a dozen times while watching it. That anyone could try to pass this off as a movie boggles my mind. The entire production would have to improve by a million percent just to be considered amateur. I've seen more riveting home movies than this. Objectively, it's one of the worst movies of all time. The only thing redeeming about it is that it has some "so bad it's good" qualities. If you watch it with friends you can all make fun of it, which improves the viewing experience but doesn't change the fact that it's a really a shitty movie. I'm giving it a 2 solely for the giggles at its incompetence. I reserve 1's for movies that should be fed to carpet monsters.

Other than that you can laugh at how badly done everything is, there is nothing remotely decent let alone good about The Creeping Terror. It is a truly dire movie that while it is unintentionally fun to watch deserves everything bad that has been said about it. Visually, The Creeping Terror is one of the most inept movies there is, the stock footage is clumsily utilised and you question why they were there at all. The editing is some of the worst known to man, making everything slipshod and incoherent, even Space Mutiny's editing wasn't this bad and the editing in that movie is the very meaning of how not to edit a movie. The sets are dull and look like a first timer constructed them, making those in Ed Wood's movies seem award-worthy in comparison. And the creature looks terrible, even worse it has no menace and doesn't even have a personality. There are scenes where the music is the same tune repeated over and over, and sadly it is one of those tunes where it gets irritating very quickly. The dialogue, when there is any, is guaranteed to have you doubled up on the floor, and not because it is legitimately funny but because of how appalling it is, if there was a list of the 20 worst scripts The Creeping Terror would be on there and towards the top. The Creeping Terror makes the extra mistake at being really preachy at the end, which will leave a bad taste in the mouth. The story is equally disastrous, again like the dialogue when there is one it is incredibly contrived. Not to mention dull, so dull in fact it makes Manos seem exciting(and the problems with that were eerily similar to those in this movie). It is a very thin story with lots of filler and no creepy atmosphere or sense of terror whatsoever, if there were scenes that tried those it came across as contrived and predictable instead. The narration is irritating as well, sometimes it just intrudes over everything and other times in some scenes things are so incoherent they're crying out for explanation. The acting is beyond description and in a very bad way, their dialogue and the cardboard archetype excuses the movie has for characters do them no favours though but that doesn't excuse anything at all. All in all, amateurish and just dire, another classic case of the MST3K episode being infinitely better than the movie they're riffing(and they really hit the nail on the head here). 0.5/10, extra half-point only for the good laugh, despite the fact that that good laugh shouldn't have happened in the first place. Bethany Cox

According to IMDb trivia, the original monster for The Creeping Terror was stolen days before shooting was to begin, and an alternative (something resembling a giant mouldy omelette or an unwashed duvet) was hastily assembled to take its place; several sources also state that director Vic Savage (hiding behind the pseudonym A.J. Nelson) lost the original soundtrack, which might explain why much of the story is told by a narrator.Although the lack of soundtrack could have been an intentional cost-saving measure, it doesn't alter the fact that Savage was clearly an all-round incompetent when it came to film-making, his dubious creative decisions easily qualifying this film as one of cinema's all-time worst.The plot for this mega-turkey sees a ravenous alien creature arriving on Earth to feed on humans. Moving at a snail's pace, the creature wanders the countryside preying on people who are so petrified by it's hideousness that all they can do is stand and scream until the shuffling beast smothers them. Meanwhile, deputy sheriff Martin (played by director Savage, proving that he's every bit as bad at acting as he is at directing) and his wife Brett (Shannon O'Neil) try to track the thing down and destroy it.After eating several canoodling couples, everyone at a hootenanny, members of a community dance hall, some incredibly dumb soldiers, and an old guy so fat that you would think it might burst, the monster is destroyed, leaving Martin pondering the wonders of the universe, and the viewer trying to figure out why they just wasted part of their life watching such utter garbage.1/10 (not even the hilarious dance scene could make me give it more).

I have heard somewhere that an important rule in film making is "show, don't tell" but the people who made this seems to have gotten it backwards because this i a clear case of tell, don't show, so much so that the narrator is even telling us the dialog of the characters. I barely consider this to be a film, its is more akin to an audio book, with some moving pictures in the background. What makes it even worse is that the narrator explains more or less all the things that could be inferred from the action or said in dialog, but does not explain some things that are less than self evident.Other than that, the movie is slow paced, poorly executed and rather silly, just like many other monster movies from the 60's. Normally, a movie like that would at least end up in the so-bad-it's-funny category but the overuse of narration makes this thing thoroughly frustrating to watch.