If you're in the mood
for a monster movie that has more bellylaughs per reel than the latest Jim Carrey opus, do
we have one for you! You see, it's a movie where...
By DAVE DUGGAN
Creeping is a good horror word. Good scary word.
There are lots of horror flicks with the word "creeping" in the title, and a lot
of them seem to feature sentient, ambulatory body parts. The Creeping Eye. The Creeping
Hand. The Creeping Flesh (which is actually quite a cool Hammer film, starring Peter
Cushing as the mad scientist who resurrects an ancient giant).
I didn’t find one called The Creeping
Spleen, but I bet it’s out there. Maybe a Brazilian horror cheapie. The
Creeping Toenail, perhaps? Or if you’d rather not get specific, there’s The
Creeping Unknown. Now that is spooky. What is it? I don’t know, man … but
it’s creeping.
And how about (appropriate dramatic music, please):
The Creeping Terror?
It’s multi-talented, horror fans. Oh, my, yes.
It creeps … it terrifies …
And it makes a great living room rug!
This movie has coverage, friends. It’s
actually compared to Plan 9. I have half a dozen books on bad movies alone, and The
Creeping Unknown is featured prominently in all of them. John Stanley tore it up. The
Medved brothers gave it a short, sweet roasting. Leonard Maltin kicked it to the curb. Of
course Mystery Science Theater 3000 had their fun with it. And I didn’t
look, but I bet it’s in Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film.
So all these other guys who are experts at drubbing
little depleted uranium rabbit pellets like this one have already had their say. So what
can I say? I mean, apart from "it sucks," which is piquant, a model of brevity,
but a bit lacking in dramatic punch, know what I mean?
Well.
The Creeping Terror was filmed on location
at Lake Tahoe, Nevada. The lake and park areas surrounding it feature a number of
interesting tourist sites, including Eagle Rock, where establishing shots of the lake were
filmed, and Chambers Beach, where director Art J. Nelson tripped over a big something and
dumped all the sound equipment into the water, resulting in the addition of extremely
hokey post-production music and narration.
| Note:
Despite what you've "heard," the film does have some synched
sound...just a little, though. Most of it is narrated in the best tradition of bad
films. |
What he tripped over is
Unknown…but I don’t suppose it was Creeping.
Lake Tahoe is formed over a large fault structure.
During that two-week period in 1964 when filming took place, the very earth might have
swallowed cameras, cast, crew and creature, drawing them down into dominion depths where
it’s too dark for even the cheapest cheeseballs to shoot past four in the afternoon.
That might have even made an interesting movie.
The waters of Tahoe are clear, deep and extremely
cold, even in summer. Perfect for drowning inept directors in. A few rocks in the pockets
and bloop! Down for the last time. According to urban legend, there are already
drowned cowboys down there, perfectly preserved over a century. A little company for our
boy Art.
That might make an interesting movie, too.
In the summer there are tourists with powerboats
and jet skis--not bad for lopping off the heads of really bad actors a la I Spit on
Your Grave--and in the winter there are skiers and snowmobiles causing avalanches all
over the surrounding mountains. The intrepid independent film school dropouts head up to
Tahoe to shoot some spooky snowy scenes, and--boom! Next time you see ‘em,
it’s spring thaw.
The lake actually belongs to two different states,
California and Nevada. South Lake Tahoe, the largest community, has all the legalized
gambling of Vegas and the tacky, shallow surface-level entertainment of any large
California city. It’s a tourist paradise.
It’s also a good place for a special effects
team to go shopping for carpet remnants, which in 1964 would have sold for about five or
ten bucks. Tear ‘em up a little bit, fray the ends, stick a couple of Slinkies to the
top, and get about five college kids to pay you for the privilege of being in a
real Hollywood motion picture, and presto! A monster is born.
| Note:
If you look real hard (well, maybe not that hard), you can see the tennis shoes
of the college kids beneath the carpet monster as it kind of sloughs along. |
This thing may have been
memorialized in all the books, revered, even elevated with the comparisons to Plan 9
and all. But look: there is only one Plan 9, and no other bad movie--no matter how
bad it really is--can hope to aspire to the kind of transcendent awfulness that Plan 9
achieves. Robot Monster came close, but I personally think it was an accident. Phil
Tucker got lucky.
The Creeping Terror did not get lucky. Close
proximity to multimillion dollar gambling facilities is not a factor, apparently.
I guess you can’t kill a carpet by trapping it
under tons of ice and snow, can you? But then, you can kill a monster made out of
carpet by hitting it with your car. And I never would have known that if I hadn’t
seen this film. You can learn something about life watching these flicks. Kids, forget
school. Play hooky, stay home all day and watch eight straight hours of movies like
this.
It’ll change your life. I mean it. It changed
my life.
Well … it made me want to go see Lake Tahoe,
anyway.
Thanks, Dave, for "pulling the
rug" out from under this little piece of schlock horror history. Still not had
enough Creeping Terror? Well, visit John-John's archives and read his slant on it!
Article copyright © Dave Duggins.
Visit his website.
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