The Creeping Terror (1964)

Don't listen to the negative reviews

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Hilariously idiotic, unbelievably bad in every way. A trip into temporary insanity. Ridiculous monster, terrible production values, industrial-strength stupidity all around. The only way to watch this is too be stoned or something like it, so I won't say you shouldn't see it, just don't expect a worthwhile movie. The reward, if any, for suffering this flick is gut-busting laughter.

It sucked up Hollywood, according to Gilda Radner in the 1982 movie documentary comedy "It Came From Hollywood", not using that line particularly, but commenting on this carpet monster's suction like mouth's ability to get past a curvy woman's hips, eating up all but their shoes. That documentary did indeed show a large hipped woman being sucked in, spitting out it's shoes. I didn't see that hysterical footage in my print of this movie, but there was plenty of footage to amuse me even if I didn't laugh. This is done in a mock documentary style, with narration told so seriously you have to wonder how the script reader got through this without a single flaw. Being done for TV, it looks cheaper even than the oldest kinescope available. It's Plan Nine meets The Blob, a must for fans of hideously bad sci fi, and ripe for ridicule. After a while though, the organ music gets truly irritating.

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.