by: -RoG-

...CONTINUED

Over at the sorority house, one of the sisters opens the door and finds Brad waiting there for Cynthia. She obviously thinks his new zombified look is just some kind of a prank, but she and the rest of her sisters are in for a big wake-up call very soon.

FRATERNITY ZOMBIES! THEY CRAVE NOT BEER, BUT YOUR BRAINS! THEY WANT TO DO KEG STANDS ON YOUR CORPSE! THEY FOREGO THE DATE RAPE AND GET RIGHT DOWN TO BUSINESS WITH DATE MURDER! Ok, I've had my fun............... for now.

So yeah, now that they've been reanimated with Creeps incubating in their heads, the bloody Beta zombies make their way to the sorority house.

Cynthia slowly makes her way downstairs to have a big talk with The Bradster. Not looking him in the eye, she doesn't realize he's dead. She sits him down and just tells him that she needs time to think while Creeps pour out of Brad's mouth as if he was a slot machine and parasites were the prize for hitting the jackpot. Fortunately for her, Cameron and Spanky show up just in the nick of time.

After Cameron blasts a hole in Brad's head, Spanky lights his face on fire with the flamethrower. So yeah, listen up all you apprehensive "lameoids" out there! If you want to win over the girl of your dreams who happens to be dating the biggest asshole in the world, just shoot him in the head and then blast a flamethrower directly into his face. After that, I guarantee you she'll be yours for the taking! Hell, she might even join you in the killing, as is the case with Cynthia.

More of the Beta fraternity zombies show up and Cynthia prepares to take them on with Chris at her side, but before the carnage continues, we get to hear what is undoubtedly one of Detective Ray Cameron's finest moments as he turns to the sorority sisters:

"I've got good news and bad news girls. The good news is your dates are here."

"What's the bad news?"

"They're dead."

Tom Atkins... Detective Ray Cameron... if I were a zombie, it would be my honor to have you shoot me in the face, and that's not something I say to just anybody. Not even my friends and family.

So the Beta zombies make their way to the sorority house, but it turns out that Cynthia and Spanky make a pretty good zombie killing team. He blasts their heads open with a shotgun and she lights 'em on fire. Oh how I do love me a lady armed with a flamethrower. Detective Cameron, however, is fighting with less firepower inside the sorority house, and has to improvise. After proclaiming, "It's Miller time!" and blasting a zombie in the head, he needs to find some flames to kill the Creeps that pour out of it before they get away. Since he doesn't have a flamethrower, he quickly grabs a can of hair spray from one of the sisters and sprays it onto his stogie to set the nearby Creeps ablaze. While the fiery battle outside rages on, Cameron is now just about to be overpowered by three zombies (one of which is a newly zombified sorority sister) in the house.

And that's when it happens. He sees a photo of his high school sweetheart on the wall and snaps. He snaps better than anybody in the history of cinema has ever snapped before. He rises up and unloads a hail of bullets on everything in the entire room. It's absolutely beautiful and brings a tear to my eye just thinking about it. Just look at this beautiful spectacle:

YES!!!! THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I WANT
TO SEE WHENEVER I FIRST OPEN MY EYES
IN THE MORNING FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE.

Chris and Cynthia take refuge in the nearby garden shack, but the Beta zombies, including UNIBROW ZOMBIE, start breaking through the thing walls. Cynthia saves manages to blast one of the zombies in the head just before it kills Chris, but then Unibrow comes after her. Now it's time for Chris to become a man.

He powers up a nearby lawnmower, looks Steve the Unibrow Zombie right in the eyes and smiles, "Later dude," and proceeds to mow him down. It's nowhere near as splatterific as the lawnmower scene from Dead Alive, but it's still a nice change from all the flamethrower-based kills. I have to admit though, I'm gonna miss Unibrow Zombie. R.I.P. bro...

Back in the sorority house, Detective Cameron is surveying all the carnage he created when he snapped. It's an impressive sight, no doubt about it, but he realizes there's still a bigger problem in the basement. Chris and Cynthia head down to the basement and find the detective down there with a can of gasoline and some duct tape over his mouth (so the Creeps can't get in). And holy crapballs, there are a LOT of the Creeps having a fiesta over those human brains that were stored down there. One of them tries jumping at him, but Cameron catches it in mid-air and says, "Don't even think about it you little son of a bitch." and then tosses it aside. That, my friends, is what I call a real man.

He then starts a countdown from twenty and gives a knowing wink to Chris as if to say, "Go on and live your life, Spanky, I've got a date with these Creeps. I'm checkin' out, but I'm taking them with me." After all, this was a guy who was going to kill himself recently anyway... now he's just finishing the job, but doing it in far more memorable fashion.

He continues to douse the basement with gasoline and then turns on the gas, while the Creeps twitch and prepare to attack him in unison. Outside, Chris finishes the countdown and then says, "Detective... thrill me." And thrill he does.

Just as the Creeps all dash out to kill him, he ignites his lighter and the entire sorority house is engulfed by a fiery explosion. As the house burns, we see a shot of a flower paying tribute to our fallen hero. Brings a tear to your eye, doesn't it?

With the Creeps defeated, Chris goes in for a celebratory kiss with Cynthia. Way to go Chris, you only had to see a bunch of people get killed and a sorority house to explode in flames before you grew the balls to make a move. God only knows what kind of carnage the world will have to endure before you try to make it to 2nd base.

Speaking of carnage, it turns out that a few of the Creeps did make it into Detective Cameron before the house blew up, because we see his burnt corpse walking along outside, and soon it collapses right in front of the town cemetery. Uh oh...

Yep, now the Creeps have been set lose with a ton of bodies at their disposal to reanimate. And just when you think all hope is lost, we see the alien spacecraft from the beginning of the movie, shining a spotlight on the graveyard. Looks like they've come back to collect their experiment, but from the look of things, the aliens are too late.

So that's one ending.

There's also an alternate ending which you some of you may not have ever seen before, so here it is:

Right after Chris and Cynthia have their big kiss, the Zombie Dog walks right up to her. She kneels down to pet it and some kind of bizarro twisty tongue thing shoots out of his mouth. Hooray for Zombie Dog! It's a fairly typical last-second-scare for a horror movie, but it's still a fun one.

I've heard a lot of people that say the graveyard ending is the true alternate ending, because that's the one that writer/director Fred Dekker wanted in the film. But every version of the film I ever saw as a kid (even in later televised rebroadcasts), had the graveyard ending. So for me, it was always the zombie dog ending that I always found to be more elusive. Both endings are aok in my book though, I'm just glad to have seen 'em both... even if it had to come in the form of some old bootlegged footage.

So that's it for Night of the Creeps. Hell of a good movie, isn't it? Again... how is this not on DVD yet!?!? While that continues to boggle my mind, I remain optimistic about it. As I'm sure many of you know, Fred Dekker's The Monster Squad was put out on DVD not too long ago, so perhaps we'll see Dekker's Creeps get a proper release in the not too distant future as well. It's already been remastered in HD, played on Showtime a lot and has a huge cult following, so I don't see why it wouldn't get a DVD release. Come on Dekker... Thrill me.

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