31 days of Cheese - Day 23: The Creeping Terror

The descent into Z-movie hell continues with 1964’s The Creeping Terror. 77 minutes of tedium and badly shot awfulness. Watch this and you can feel the will to live start to drift away.

The plot of this film is fairly simple. A space ship crashes down near an isolated California town and from it emerges a monster. It starts eating people. Local law enforcement and some government types stop it but not after a lot of folks done been et. Whole rooms full of folks; the middle third of the film is the monster eating folks. Plot twists such as they are, are one there are two monsters on the loose and one in the spaceship (this one busts loose after the first one has been killed) and the second twist is that they are artificial constructs designed to analyze human beings. After they have been et one assumes.

What makes this film this film is the monster.

The Creeping Terror is hard to describe. It’s in two parts, the front part looks to me like a big chess piece (a king or a queen) covered with stuff that looks taped one. The top of the beast is covered with eyes attached by springs so they wave about as the thing moves (very slowly, hence the Creeping in the title). It has short stubby arms and its mouth is at the base between what looks like feet or just the actor’s feet in boots sticking out. (The people getting et typically crawl in then a stage hand pulls them in and they wave their legs about a bit before being completely devoured.)

Behind this front bit is a sort of Bridal looking trail made of well It’s been described as looking like it was sew together out of carpet remnants and I can’t think of a better way to describe it- under which several extras huddle and follow along as the front bit moves.

It’s even more absurd than the Ro-Man from Robot Monster.

In addition to that, the film is horrible even lacking even simple technical competence. A lot of the film is over exposed; the sound was dubbed in after. Most of the sound is narration where the actor’s words are paraphrased or we are told what we are seeing. When they do have dialogue, the poor sound synch makes it look like it dubbed from a Swedish film.

Nobody can act of course. It seems most of the people were locals who actually paid money to be in the film. They were robbed.

The guy who did it was male leads Vic Savage who also co-wrote, produced and directed (under another name) and is the one who, well not to put it to finely, bilked the towns folks. There are a lot of weird stories about this film. (I understand a documentary is being made.) One is that Vic had no real intent to finish the film, it was a con really, but when he was threatened by a law suit cobbled the film together added the narration, the annoying sound track (a organ that wouldn’t sound wrong at a roller rink is featured) and some stock footage (including a shot of an Atlas rocket taking off played backwards as the alien ship landing – not even Ed Wood would do that) and then took for parts unknown.

There is even some question as to whether this film had a real release in theaters. Some brave souls have found some evidence that it was part of a triple feature in the Cleveland area but that has not been confirmed. (It would have been played as the middle film so people not willing to leave before the main picture came on would go out and get popcorn or something. Hey theaters got to make their money too.).

Just awful in every way and shape you can imagine this is what the bottom of the barrel looks like.

Enjoy, if you must, with low calorie snacks.