Film Year: 1964
Genre: Horror, Science Fiction
Director: A.J. Nelson (Vic Savage)
Starring: Vic Savage, Shannon O'Neil, William Thourlby, John Caresio, and Larry Burrell as the voice of everyone
MST Season: 6
The Movie
*I HAVE SURVIVED WATCHING THIS MOVIE UNRIFFED*
One of the most infamous bad movies of all time sees a giant carpet monster unleashed upon planet Earth by alien invaders. It's mission: to devour human beings...very...slowly... The movie isn't all that different in premise than The Blob, which was another low budget sci-fi horror from the same period which was also about a creature from outer space that set out to ingest everything in sight. The key difference is that the people who made The Blob knew how to work with the budget they had, whereas The Creeping Terror just does whatever whether it looks good or not.
One of the most infamous bad movies of all time sees a giant carpet monster unleashed upon planet Earth by alien invaders. It's mission: to devour human beings...very...slowly... The movie isn't all that different in premise than The Blob, which was another low budget sci-fi horror from the same period which was also about a creature from outer space that set out to ingest everything in sight. The key difference is that the people who made The Blob knew how to work with the budget they had, whereas The Creeping Terror just does whatever whether it looks good or not.
One can easily tell by watching this production that something is off. It wasn't made by real filmmakers and it shows. Acting is often stiff and dull, and that's when they let the actors act at all. Most of the time the film goes silent and lets a narrator spoonfeed what's going on to the audience, even dubbing the actors himself. Legend has it that most of the film's soundtrack somehow wound up at the bottom of a lake, though the docudrama The Creep Behind the Camera implies that it was lost when the film switched possession in post.
All of this is without mentioning the monster scenes themselves. Probably an entire book could be written about the ineffectiveness of the titular Creeping Terror, which looks ridiculous and just crawls around, lets its victims stare at it, and then they scream and crawl inside. A smart filmmaker might improvise a reasoning behind this to cover up their budget limitation, like the monster creating a hypnotic state for its victims, but nope. The people he eats are just suicidal.
As we examine these monster scenes, we find that the film might be successful in being a horror film in all the wrong ways. The movie isn't scary, but it does make the audience uneasy in it's voyeuristic qualities. A lot of the time the victims of the Terror are young women in skimpy clothing being dragged into it headfirst as we get a grand look and their hinders and bare legs as they are devoured alive, being devoured in an erotic fashion we haven't seen since Legend of Dinosaurs. The film is filled with peeping tom imagery like this that may indeed succeed in making the viewer uncomfortable, up to and including a mother of a sick infant being devoured and leaving a baby all alone screaming for his mother.
It could feel that all of this is intentional, which may make it arguable that the film achieves its goals, but then we come back to the shoddy production of the film itself. At this point the final conclusion becomes "No, it's just a shit movie." Even worse, it was reportedly a bit of a scam movie as well, with some shady dealings being done to get it made by director, producer, and star Vic Savage. The making of The Creeping Terror was retold in a stylized manner in the independent film The Creep Behind the Camera. If one enjoys films like Ed Wood or The Disaster Artist, it's worth a look.
The Episode
With a narrator constantly jabbering in this movie one might initially conclude that Mike and the Bots are in trouble with this one. However they seem to realize that most of what the narrator says is empty and not important, to which they decide it's safe to talk over him. They have a lot of fun with this movie, as the constant lack of dialogue means the trio can safely dub their own voices into the main characters and when they do decide to pay attention to the narrator, they delight in adding their own inanities into his mouth. And still there is a lot of downtime where the narrator just gives up on describing what's onscreen, and our riffers cut loose. In the sequences of silence when the Terror just wanders around and eats people the guys never leave a silent moment, and the results are constantly funny.
The host segments are something of an acquired taste. Personally I think they're pretty funny, but I could understand why most wouldn't. My favorite is probably Servo as a security guard, which is a wildly fun way to open the episode. Another I quite enjoy is Mike's stereo system which only plays the repetitive music from the film. It's pretty lengthy, but for people like me who understand the hobby Mike is portraying here it's a fairly amusing parody. I also quite like the way they "stick it" to Love American Style, which is an amusingly out there sketch of them venting about a series that hasn't been relevant nor has really been thought about for about twenty years by the time this segment aired.
I wouldn't argue with anybody who might consider The Creeping Terror one of the best of the series, as it's very consistent with its laughs and has an infamously silly movie as its centerpiece. Despite thinking highly of it myself, it's not really one I think of when I list my favorites of the series. I'm not entirely certain why this is but if I were to hazard a guess I'd say it's because while the episode is wildly funny it's not a tango dance between the commentary and the movie like I always claim the best episodes are. The question is do I lump it with the greats or do I just say it's a solid one worth watching? I'm going to round down on this one, though it's definitely split decision.
The host segments are something of an acquired taste. Personally I think they're pretty funny, but I could understand why most wouldn't. My favorite is probably Servo as a security guard, which is a wildly fun way to open the episode. Another I quite enjoy is Mike's stereo system which only plays the repetitive music from the film. It's pretty lengthy, but for people like me who understand the hobby Mike is portraying here it's a fairly amusing parody. I also quite like the way they "stick it" to Love American Style, which is an amusingly out there sketch of them venting about a series that hasn't been relevant nor has really been thought about for about twenty years by the time this segment aired.
I wouldn't argue with anybody who might consider The Creeping Terror one of the best of the series, as it's very consistent with its laughs and has an infamously silly movie as its centerpiece. Despite thinking highly of it myself, it's not really one I think of when I list my favorites of the series. I'm not entirely certain why this is but if I were to hazard a guess I'd say it's because while the episode is wildly funny it's not a tango dance between the commentary and the movie like I always claim the best episodes are. The question is do I lump it with the greats or do I just say it's a solid one worth watching? I'm going to round down on this one, though it's definitely split decision.
Good
The DVD
The Creeping Terror crawled it's way onto DVD in Rhino's Volume 1 set. Audio and video were both solid, while special features offered the feature film unriffed. The transfer of this film seemed to be the exact same one used in the episode.
Shout Factory re-released Volume 1 themselves with The Creeping Terror also with solid audio and video, though the unriffed film is no longer present. The bonus features lean quite heavily on the docudrama The Creep Behind the Camera, which includes a trailer for it and a Q&A after a screening of the film, which has Frank and Trace in attendance (Frank contributes to the discussion, Trace sits silently). There's also a 2014 trailer for The Creeping Terror.
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