I am screaming and punching myself: MST3K: The Creeping Terror

At first, I ignored this little gem on the first Mystery Science Theater 3000 collection. (After all, I had Skydivers, by the legendary Coleman Francis, to occupy my attention.)

Then my friend and fellow MYSTie Charles asked what I thought of the ridiculous monster in The Creeping Terror, and I had to go back and actually examine the film.

My verdict on the monster? Well, as Tom Servo put it, it is creeping.

Seriously, this thing barely gets up to 1 mph, yet it consumes humans like M&Ms. Charles said it reminded him of a bunch of folks under a carpet, and that's the best description I've heard yet.

See, 'cause when you've got a bunch of folks underneath a carpet, they can help a victim climb inside the monster:

"Ya got her, Frank?" "Yup. Upsie daisy, here we go."

The monster likes to eat folks headfirst, which results in a lot of these shots:

A lot of these shots.

Which makes me wonder if the director had a "thing" about legs and feet.

Hmmm.

Yyyyeah.

And here's a little something for the ladies:

After a "strange object" lands on Earth, through the miracle of missile launch footage run backwards (no, I'm not kidding), one monster emerges from the capsule while another stays inside it and runs the electronic equipment... or something.

We're told that the law enforcement of Angel County, where the capsule landed, are doing all they can to figure out the situation. What's really great about The Creeping Terror is that all of this is told to us while we watch the conversations take place. (My apologies for the awful video quality. My video editing settings are a work in progress.)

I can't figure out what the deal is there, because we have sound for some of the scenes in the movie but not others. Did the sound equipment malfunction? Did the actors do such a bad job that the task of moving the plot forward was punted to the narrator? Or did the filmmakers just patch together a bunch of unrelated footage to try to make a movie, using narration as a kind of cinematic duct tape?

It's a mystery of cosmic proportions. But enough about the goofy-ass dubbing. Back to the goofy-ass alien! After emerging from the capsule, the monster eats a bathing suit-clad couple making out, which is just a given in these types of movies. From there, it moves on to eating a housewife (head-first, we must presume):

Then, it chows down on a little boy and his grandfather, in a sequence that yields one of the biggest laughs in the movie. Grandpa falls into a stream that's maybe 4 inches deep and Tom frantically yells "Let the current carry you away! Swim!"

From there, the monster scarfs up an entire hootenanny, using another making-out couple as an appetizer. It's confronted by the only civilian in the movie to stand up to it. Unfortunately, that civilian is attempting to use as a weapon...

... a guitar. It doesn't work too well.

Now, you'd think the monster would be stuffed by now, unable to eat another bite. But no! This insatiable alien heads for the town dance, apparently held in the middle of the afternoon and attended by people with a median age of 39.

You hear that song in the dance sequence? It continues throughout the whole thing. It's like 7 or 8 minutes long, and it has no obvious verse, chorus, entrance or exit points. To borrow a line from another episode, it's a Mobius strip of song; it continues endlessly to no discernible purpose.

The monster eats a few folks at the dance and scares away the rest. But it only seems to scare them to lovers lane (the scenes feature the same actors), where it eats a couple ... in a really disturbing way.

Then it mauls a dude in a crapped out car and seems to, once again, hump the car in a kind of dominance-celebrating move.

You know, no matter how big the monster supposedly gets, its "head" is always the very size of a dude holding a giant head on a stick. Funny, that.

Finally, the county government wises up and calls in the army.

An Army dude blows up the monster with a grenade, then the doctor guy (we saw him talking with Martin the sheriff; what he was actually saying, we'll never know) sifts through the remains and realizes something urgent. He beats feet over to the capsule, there's an explosion, another alien comes out and mauls him a bit, then Martin beats the crap out of the electronics within the capsule.