Getting Icky With It

Last month my old Usenet pal Aaron Reynolds, who’s spent the last decade or so building a meme empire as the Effin’ Birds guy, asked me to join him for the Toronto Comicon edition of Bootleg Safari.

Bootleg Safari is a panel where Aaron and a guest explore the best and worst of knockoff merchandise in front of an audience of very committed nerds. (I’ve said this before, but I have a weird life.)

Usually, Aaron tackles toys or games, like extremely unlicensed Simpsons or Power Rangers figures or the Harry Potter-adjacent universe of Justice Magician. But Aaron wanted to do something a little different with me, so we wound up talking about the world of movies – specifically, movies that shamelessly ripped off Ridley Scott’s Alien.

If you’re a horror fan of a certain age, you’ve seen your share – the Xtros, the Timewalkers, the Italian and Spanish variations, and so on. There are dozens of them, and in the end we boiled it down to just two: The English director Norman J. Warren’s fascinatingly weird Inseminoid, which I would represent, and Allan Holzman’s delightfully sleazy Forbidden World, which was Aaron’s pick.

We had a great time with our modest but very engaged audience, sharing clips and explaining why all the production value in the world can’t help you when you don’t understand what sort of movie you’re making – and why a monster made out of Hefty bags and lawnmower parts can be awfully fun to watch when you do. Aaron posts video of these panels on the BS Vimeo page; ours isn’t up yet, but there are 25 others up there that’ll happily eat your brain.

I had both films on Blu-ray, because I’m me, so it was easy enough to pull clips. And just days after Comicon, Shout! Studios went and released a new 4K edition of Forbidden World … and followed it one week later with another beloved creature feature, Fred Dekker’s Night of the Creeps. Shall we?

Forbidden World didn’t have much of a life on the B-movie circuit in 1982, and didn’t achieve the same cult status as some of Roger Corman’s other pictures around that same time, like Humanoids from the Deep or Galaxy of Terror did. Possibly that’s because Corman never gave it the same standing, having only commissioned it in the first place because he had some sets left over from the Galaxy of Terror shoot and asked Holzman to make another monster-horror picture with them before they were broken down. (Obligatory trivia: The production designer on Galaxy of Terror was a young James Cameron, which is why those sets look so good. And Bill Paxton was one of his set decorators!)

But Holzman and screenwriter Tim Curnen really went for it, cooking up a thriller about seasoned space fixer Mike Colby (Jesse Vint), dispatched by his employers to clean up a mess at a research station on the desert planet of Xarbia. On arrival, Mike and his robot sidekick SAM-104 are greeted by a group of scientists trying their best to keep him from hunting down the monster they’ve accidentally created in their search for a new food source. Also, because this is a Roger Corman movie from the early ’80s, everyone’s really horny.

As in every Alien knockoff, people go wandering into corridors while the monster picks them off one by one, but here’s the surprise: Everything about Forbidden World is just a little bit sharper than it needs to be. Like a lot of Corman productions, it's brimming with talented people: A young Scott Paulin turns up as a skeevy security chief, Fox Harris, who plays the station’s overprotective scientist, is basically doing a test run for his unforgettable Repo Man oddball, and the DP was Tim Suhrstedt, who’d go on to shoot Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Office Space, among others.

The visual effects are distressingly good, bringing an element of squicky body horror to the story that becomes truly unsettling when we find out why the mutant does what it does. But the script also makes room for appealing B-movie silliness, as in a moment that references Close Encounters by having June Chadwick’s well-meaning scientist try to communicate with the beast through music … and getting a disco symphony in response.

In a very entertaining documentary that’s been part of Shout’s Forbidden World package since the first 2010, Holzman explains that the project started with Corman giving him four days to shoot the prologue sequence – a space battle between Colby and some raiders that’s never referenced again – and suggesting that Lawrence of Arabia might be a good starting point. It does sort of explain the whole “eh, no one expects anything from this so we might as well enjoy ourselves” vibe of the thing.

Night of the Creeps plays with the same expectations. Writer-director Dekker may not have reached the career highs of his old friend Shane Black, but his name in a credit block almost always guaranteed a good time. This was his first feature, a throwback to ’50s drive-in horror that pits a nerdy pledge Chris Romero (Jason Lively) and cranky homicide detective Ray Cameron (Tom Atkins) against an infestation of space slugs bent on turning an entire college campus into rampaging zombies. Can they save the campus, or at least keep Chris’ would-be girlfriend Cynthia Cronenberg (Jill Whitlow) from getting zombified by her undead ex Brad?

This is a movie made by a guy who loves what he’s doing, and you can feel Dekker’s affection for the genre in almost every frame: He names all of the characters after horror directors and shoots the film with bright, engaging colors, the better to suggest a slightly artificial B-movie world. (He even tips his hat to the film's pulpy origins with a black-and-white prologue!) But Dekker also makes sure to flesh out his characters, giving the leads believable insecurities and motivations that keep them from being generic monster fodder.

And the actors respond: Atkins channels Cameron’s growling, impatient energy into arias of insults and hard-boiled monologues, while Steve Marshall finds an odd dignity in the horndog optimism of Chris’ best pal J.C., who would be a one-dimensional joke in anyone else’s version of this movie. Marshall even gets the film’s best moment, though it’s in the form of a voice note J.C. leaves for Chris once the mayhem starts.

And the mayhem is fun, with Dekker using the inherent goofiness of the concept as an excuse for his heroes to beat up zombified frat assholes without guilt and indulge his makeup effects crew at every opportunity. Not all of the effects have held up over forty years, but that’s also part of the charm.

Same goes for Forbidden World, really, and the best thing about revisiting both of these films in Shout’s new 4K discs is seeing how good they look. Night of the Creeps is bright and colorful – which might seem counterintuitive, given how much of the film takes place at night and how many of the characters wear ’80s pastels, but it also serves to showcase all the blood and goo that’s splattered around in the second half.

The lack of polish on Forbidden World translates into a sort of scrappy authenticity in the UHD master – you can feel how much work is going into the project, even though everybody knows this thing is destined for drive-ins and grindhouses. Holzman knew his market and didn’t condescend to it, and even tried to enjoy himself creatively as much as Dekker would with Night of the Creeps – which brings me to the unexpected bonus of the set.

Shout first resuscitated Holzman’s cut of Forbidden World – five minutes longer, and sporting the project’s original title, Mutant – for that 2010 Blu-ray, sourced from what looked like half-inch videotape, accompanied by a new commentary from the filmmaker. That version was in 4:3, and standard definition; the 4K set offers both the theatrical and director’s cuts in 2160p/24 UHD, both sourced from the original camera negative.

I never, ever expected to see such a loving reconstruction of a version literally no one was ever expected to see, but here it is, and it is indeed the superior cut. Corman made Holzman trim a few jokes to keep the film moving – and probably to bring the picture down to four reels instead of five – and a little of its weird spark was lost in the snipping. Also, SAM-104’s robotic voice is more generic-droid in this version, whereas the theatrical cut had the character looped by an actor with an upbeat, youthful voice, giving the diminutive bot a chipper personality that’s immediately at odds with all the sex and violence. That’s the one thing that’s better in the theatrical cut, I guess.

All the extras produced for the 2010 Blu are carried over on the companion Blu-ray, which also houses new transfers of both cuts: A half-hour retrospective documentary that lets Holzman and his crew enjoy their memories without pretending they made a classic for the ages, interviews with Corman (always a pleasure) and special-effects artist John Carl Buechler and some fun marketing and image galleries.

While Shout’s previous collector’s edition of Night of the Creeps also included the theatrical and director’s cuts of the film on separate Blu-rays, only the director’s cut makes it onto the 4K upgrade. The theatrical version was almost identical, save for a different ending that was shot when TriStar Pictures rejected Dekker’s more evocative wrap-up; Dekker managed to get it back out there in 2009, when Sony first brought the movie to Blu-ray, and his cut has been the one in circulation for the last fifteen years.

Shout’s three-disc set offers 4K and Blu-ray platters of the feature, and a bonus Blu-ray of extras. As with Forbidden World, all the supplements from the previous release are here – commentary tracks from Dekker and the cast, a really fun hour-long retrospective documentary, deleted scenes and a salute to Atkins from the Sony disc and more recent interviews with editor Michael N. Knue and cast members Lively, Suzanne Snyder, Ken Heron, Allan Kayster and Vic Polizos produced for the Shout! special edition.

The 4K set also offers new audio commentary from Snyder and filmmaker fans Jackson Stewart (Beyond the Gates) and Francis Galluppi (The Last Stop in Yuma County), as well as a new half-hour interview with Dekker in which the director looks back at his career with special focus on his fondness for Creeps. I can’t blame him; he made a really fun picture. And this is a great way to watch it.

 

Forbidden World and Night of the Creeps are available now in 4K/Blu-ray combo editions from Shout! Studios, under the Scream Factory imprint. They are very entertaining, in their way. And if you’re curious, Inseminoid is also out there in Blu-ray special editions from Shout in North America and Powerhouse’s Indicator line in the UK. I can’t exactly recommend it, but its inability to capture either the tension or the dread of Ridley Scott’s masterpiece is some kind of accomplishment.

Up next: Two very different New York stories join the Criterion Collection, and Warner upgrades three Clint Eastwood classics to UHD. See you soon.