What a weird cold open. It's delivered in two parts: some weird thumb looking aliens loose a big test tube in space, and then we see it crash land on 1950s Earth and infect half of one of those classic "sit in a car and make out on a hill and then check on a noise and get killed by an escaped psycho" couples. Then we cut again to 1986, and two guys who are somehow both nerds and unaware of what cryogenics are, are trying to talk to girls at a frat party. They're also very suggestible, so to join a sorority (I'm not American, but I get the impression that this is the kind of place where rich white boys went to help them grow up into rich white old men who would then be the bad guys on 'The X-Files') they end up trying to steal a body, which happens to have been infected by the slugs and then frozen in the 50's.
The comedy here is understated enough to be enjoyable, and has a similar feeling to 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' on its good days. The horror element is less satisfactory (especially tension wise, which is often intentionally goofy in any case) but does manage to produce the odd jump-scare. The characters are all pretty god awful, and each falls into very well defined stereotypes. That and them being children, yet somehow living in mansions, meant that I didn't care for any of them at all. I don't think character sympathy in horror is as necessary as people make out anyway, though (cough 'The Walking Dead' cough). The two friends are occasionally fun, what with banter and whatnot, and I liked the detective, but I didn't really care for anyone else.
"What is this, a homicide or a bad B movie?" - I hate to have to tell you...
Hey this looks more like a uni than a college, the liars. Anyway, there's a great deal of set up, and a multitude of characters and dangers introduced so that the last hour of the movie struggles not to be a convoluted mess. It partially succeeds, but I still think it could have done with the alien slug things not being able to race around by themselves, so that we only have to infested zombie bodies to worry about. There are also lots of weird continuity mistakes towards the end where the guy is wearing the flame thrower one minute, and the girl is in the next scene, and vice versa.
Overall an enjoyable, cheesy, self-aware comedy horror, with the odd neat (and very 80's) gore effect and an amusing set of characters.
Night of the Creeps: 35.0