The quintessential Golden Turkey Award winning horror film, The Creeping Terror, makes the films of Ed Wood seem brilliant by comparison. I first saw it as a kid when it was shown periodically on Friday late-night television. I was a young teen who liked a lot of rotten films, but this one was bewilderingly awful even for a teenager's smart-ass low expectations.
Now I haven't watched this film anew since I was in my early 'twenties & have no desire to catch up with it again. If I were ever to watch it anew, it would have to be the Mystery Science Fiction Theater version with Tom Servo & other puppets making fun of it.
I do not second the widespread belief that The Creeping Terror belongs to the "so bad it's good" category; rather, it's so bad that one cannot turn away, much as one might not be able to stop looking at a drowned goat floating in a sess pool.
That it has never entirely left my memory perhaps says more in its favor than I will allow, but I think the memorableness stems from the sheer absurdity of such a film even existing. Like I also remember long ago seeing such things as a homeless drunk squatting on the sidewalk to take a dump in full view of pedestrians on a bright of day; & a squirmy pile of maggots shaped exactly like a dog with no evidence of the dog itself.
I may not remember it quite correctly after so long, but as I recall, the plot is simple to the point of non-existent: A monster from space devours people. The monster is just a soiled patchwork of shag carpets thrown over some extras wearing fuzzy slippers & whose limbs get glimpsed from time to time crawling around to make the carpet move. When the rug "eats" people, they are obviously just climbing under the rug.
There is a voice-over narration that speaks the dialogue to close-ups of characters standing in front of a stationary camera. For long patches of film there is no soundtrack at all. It looks as though the whole film was made without any sound equipment, & then when sound was being added later they couldn't figure out how to do looping, so they just went with the periodic narration.
copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl
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