The Deepest Cuts is a weekly invitation into some of the sleaziest, goriest, most under-explored corners of horror and cult film online. Every title will be streamable and totally NSFW. Whether it’s a 1960s grindhouse masterpiece, something schlocky from the 90s, or hardcore horror from around the world, these films are guaranteed to shock, disturb, tickle, or generally blow your mind.

Aliens with disturbingly large heads! A crazed ax murderer/mental hospital escapee! Fecal-looking, slug-like parasites that enter their human prey through the mouth! And, of course, zombies!! Though it obviously has a little something for everyone, Night of the Creeps is definitely a horror movie fan’s horror movie, with its twisted sense of humor, countless references to classic films of the genre, legitimate suspense, and, my personal favorite, plenty of gore.

Night of the Creeps is primarily a college coed comedy/creature feature, so it’s a surprise when the film opens on a spaceship, manned by very odd-looking aliens arguing about an experiment – a glass tube that flies through space to land in the woods near “Sorority Row, 1959.” Within the next black-and-white, barbershop quartet-soundtracked ten minutes, a wholesome young man wanders after the projectile into the woods, where he is attacked by its brain-hungry-slug contents, leaving his date to be slaughtered by the local axe murderer, who just happens to be passing by at that very moment. Jump to “Pledge Week, 1989,” and two geeks hoping to impress the prettiest girl at the party are dared by the Beta brothers to leave a corpse on a competing frat’s porch; when they free their quarry from the mini-cryo-lab in the med school’s basement (of course), the “experiment” is awakened, and the zombie-creating, cigar-shaped parasites begin a feeding frenzy that quickly takes over campus. Like I said: this movie has it all.

Night of the Creeps is a great example of one of the more interesting, enjoyable (and my personal favorite) trends in 1980s/90s horror movies: the homage to the horror and sci-fi greats of the past, the lower-brow, the better. Kids growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s were witness to a renaissance in American cinema, the so-called “New Hollywood,” with indie landmarks like The Graduate and Easy Rider running successfully alongside art cinema both epic and local in scale, like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Nashville; these paved the way for the auteurist high concept films to come, which would define genre filmmaking going forward.

At the same time, American International Pictures, ground zero for the careers of an impressive number of successful writers, directors, and actors (Scorcese, Coppola, Nicholson, DeNiro), was pushing junk-food at the newly-targeted teenage audience, with low-budget and international horror, science fiction, and blaxploitation films playing countrywide.

Though there are any number of “golden ages” of cinema, particularly when broken up into genres/styles, it’s no wonder that the material filling the movie theaters in this particular era would lead to a particularly rich output from directors looking back. As technology improved and special effects modernized, films like Night of the Creeps embraced stiff models, ludicrous “monsters,” and truly tasteless splatter, representing a sort of “third wave” in exploitation cinema.

This movie is particularly explicit in its tributes, with character names like “Cynthia Cronenberg” and “Chris Romero” attending “Corman University,” and featuring an old-fashioned cop with a cheesy catchphrase – “Thrill me” – played by Halloween 3: Season of the Witch star Tom Atkins. And though I’ve seen a number of references to a possible relationship between Night of the Creeps’ alien parasites and the creatures in Slither, viewers in the know will recognize these nasty little shit-critters from David Cronenberg’s first horror film, Shivers (aka They Came from Within) – a genealogy Freud could really sink his teeth into.

The great thing about these particular parasites is that their victims are turned into blood-thirsty zombies (whether they were originally human or feline in origin), so in order to kill them, the cop, our nerdy hero, and the beautiful gal must first chop or explode open the attackers’ heads, then light the creatures that come slithering out by the tens on fire with a trusty flamethrower from the local precinct.

For movie nerds (I’m guessing) it must be especially satisfying to watch zombified frat brothers destroyed twice over, involving even a lawn mower in one instance. Thankfully the version streaming online features the “director’s cut” ending, which left the door open for a possible sequel; we can only hope that the growing interest in anti-CGI filmmaking might lead to a worthy part two.

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You can find Night of the Creeps streaming free on Crackle.

For more insight into the best (and worst) of cult horror classics, check past editions of The Deepest Cuts here.

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