It’s 1998 and World War Three has broken out. The land is ravaged by nuclear strikes and a general apocalypse. A small group of soldiers have deserted their platoon and run off, hiding in an abandoned city, on the run, hoping they don’t get caught. An acid rain storm strikes and they have to seek shelter, breaking into a building and sealing it back up, going deep down into its recesses, hoping to wait out the war, or at least the acid rain. It is here they discover that something else is living down in this abandoned science facility, something very monstrous and very deadly. The soldiers have to decide whether to escape or fight back, and the consequence of this decision is literally life or death.
So, yeah, this is basically Alien and Aliens (with a dash of Deadites thrown in) done on a super-cheap budget with some interesting monsters that look mostly like plastic and straight out of 1950’s B-movies. I saw this originally on VHS back in the 80’s and all I remembered from it was Linnea Quigley’s nude shower scene (I have my priorities right) and a cool-looking monster (again, priorities). The rest of the movie didn’t even exist in my mind. My memories held up to be pretty true, as the most remarkable moments involved Quigley’s naked breasts and the monster. The majority of the movie is filled with the characters running up and down plain hallways and crawling through what look to be air ducts but really aren’t. There’s a lot of yammering, too, and although the dialogue really amounts to nothing, the actors throw themselves fully into it. They’re all uniformly good for this low-budget endeavor, with Quigley stealing the show, of course (this whole thing felt like a showcase for her and her, uh, assets). The entire look is straight out of Prop Room 101, with each character wearing almost identical clothing and carrying the same exact cheap, plastic-looking guns (which appear to be hand-held machine guns, but actually fire lasers, which is cool, but they only shoot them a couple of times, so uncool). We get a breakfast transformation scene, we get giant stuffed and wet-looking rats that attack by attaching themselves to the characters hands and not moving at all, except when the character rubs their snouts against their necks, and we get a cool, giant monster that can hardly move but looks great. The best of all is the mutant baby at the end, animatronic and creepy as hell.
All in all, Creepozoids is a fun, if empty, B-movie. There’s lots of loving winks and nods at the old Fifties monster movies, with the cheap man-in-a-costume look and staged rat attacks. So the charm here outweighs any of the negatives. How can you hate a movie that just wants to show you a good time, despite its budgetary shortcomings? Also, it’s short and to the point, and there’s a lot to be said for that.
Three Stars out of Four