It was an honest mistake, I swear! I had remembered reading in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre that The Creeping Unknown was worth seeing. I’d known about this movie under the title The Quatermass Xperiment since I was a tween. The problem when you grow up with no money in a small town is that you don’t have access to such things. Then a friend gave me a DVD of The Creeping Terror. I thought it was The Creeping Unknown. The disc hadn’t spun too many revolutions before I realized I was watching what may be the worst movie ever made. Many reserve that for Plan 9 from Outer Space, but believe me, this is much worse. The story of a couple of aliens sent to eat people to transmit to their superiors what our weaknesses are, it seemed to me that the main weakness is nobody thought to run from this slow-moving monster, except one guy who just abandoned his girlfriend to it. (Apparently girls don’t run.)
Like that other baddie, The Beast of Yucca Flats, the audio was not preserved so nearly all of the film is a voice-over by an authoritative-sounding announcer. There are a few dubs, but they aren’t well done. And then extended scenes of young people at a dance (have you ever heard of just filling up time?) are intercut with perhaps the slowest monster attack in history. There’s so much not to like here. The poor acting. The plot nearly as dimwitted as Trump. The stock footage of a rocket launch run backwards to make it look as if it’s landing. The sheriff making out with his wife in the patrol car while “on a break” from looking for the monster. The instrument panels from beyond our galaxy with Arabic numerals and Latin letters. You find yourself hoping for the Apocalypse so you won’t have to watch the rest, and it’s only 74 minutes long.
Somehow it comes as little surprise that the director (also producer, editor, and star), under the name Vic Savage, disappeared never to be heard of again. The film’s main financier, had to try to put the movie together for release. (He also had a role in the movie.) There is, as I’ve mentioned often before, an aesthetic to watching bad movies. I’ve ended up seeing many of “the worst of all time” in my spate of movie viewing over the past three or four years. This is the first time it has happened by mistake. I do have to say that it’s easier to appreciate a bad movie when you can see that it’s coming and prepare yourself accordingly. The Creeping Unknown remains elusive.
