THE CREEPING TERROR (1964)
Article #517 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 8-14-2002
Posting date: 1-7-2003

Strange creatures from outer space terrorize Lake Tahoe.

There are actually a couple of decent and novel ideas in this story, though they don’t appear until near the end; specifically, I like the nature of the creatures and what their mission is on this planet. I also kind of like the way it ends without a total victory on either side. Unfortunately, this is one of the most unwatchably incompetent movies around, with its poor acting (what you can make of it, anyway), awful direction, and its notorious soundtrack problems. For those of you not familiar with the latter, the vocal soundtrack for this movie was lost, and to compensate for this, endless narration was employed to compensate for this problem, and it is a very poor substitute. Not that the movie would improve immeasurably with its original soundtrack; it would still be a pretty bad movie, even though certain sequences would gain quite a bit, particular a sequence near the end which actually has the potential to be exciting. Mostly, it’s a series of monster attacks, and though the monster is interesting in concept, it is badly constructed and so slow-moving (“creeping” is the accurate word in the title) that these scenes are endless and unbelievable, as it requires people to sit there screaming in place for several moments in order for the monster to have any chance to catch them. It’s not my choice for the worst movie I’ve ever seen, but it’s definitely in the running.