Night of the Creeps: Director's Cut

Cult movies are curious phenomena, as exemplified by Fred Dekker's 1986 horror comedy about two college geeks who unwittingly revive a long-preserved corpse, thereby unleashing a bunch of alien slugs that possess the local populace and transform them into an army of rampaging zombies. Night of the Creeps is not an especially good film—even by the rather low B-movie standards of its time—though a black-and-white prologue set in 1959 is amusingly tacky, and veteran actor Tom Atkins has a ball playing a detective so hardboiled that he makes Bogart's Sam Spade seem like a wuss. The movie didn't make much of a splash during its original release, which was hamstrung by poor distribution, and it probably would have sunk into well-deserved obscurity had it not been adopted by a small group of obsessive fans who made it their cause and over the years drove up the price of bootleg video copies. Night of the Creeps bows on DVD and pristine-looking Blu-ray in a director's cut edition (the original theatrical ending—a bit of post-Carrie cynicism—is included as a bonus) with copious extras: two audio commentaries (the first with Dekker; the second with Atkins and his co-stars Jason Lively, Steve Marshall, and Jill Whitlow), six behind-the-scenes featurettes, and a trivia track. Those who've contented themselves with fuzzy dubs for years will rejoice, but except for genre fanatics and ‘80s nostalgia buffs, this is an optional purchase. (F. Swietek)