Why the Carpet Monster Scares Me

In 1980, the movie The Creeping Terror was featured in a book, The Golden Turkey Awards.  The book shared information about a variety of movies that are considered the worst ever made. In addition to being an extremely bad movie, this one is also very fun to watch.  It involves a creature in a spaceship that terrorizes the town where it lands.  It sounds like a standard 1950’s science fiction film but the technical details of the film give it the boost that make it comedy gold.  The monster appears to be made from a giant remnant of carpet with a bunch of kids underneath it to make it move.  In several of the scenes, you can see the kid’s sneakers.  The movie was made in a small town in Texas where the director had the people from the town pay him to be in the movie. This is one of the reasons you see so many people get eaten by the monster.  The director also ran out of money before he could finish the film.  Before it could be finalized, the soundtrack got separated from the film.  They couldn’t get the people to overdub the dialogue because they were mad about the film.  For the most part, the film is narrated like a nature film.  In one memorable scene, a scientist and a military officer are arguing whether to kill or capture the monster.  The narrator describing action says “The Colonel, more concerned with saving human lives than advancing Science, told Bradford to Go to Hell.”

As a collector of bad movies, this one that I had a hard time finding on DVD.  In 2002, I saw that Rhino Home Video was releasing a DVD set of four Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes that included their The Creeping Terror episode, number 606.  I had enjoyed MST3K but didn’t consider myself a fan at the time.  But I purchased this set because it included the original versions of all four films. It was also the only option for getting this film on DVD at the time.

I watched all of the films in this set with my family and they enjoyed them all. While they liked The Creeping Terror, their favorite was a beach party type film called Catalina Caper, starring Tommy Kirk. In the MST3K version, Tom Servo falls in love with a character named Katrina, but the robots lovingly refer to as “Creepy Girl”.  The Creepy Girl love song would be sung around the Wheeler house for years to come. Over the years, I would introduce my kids to other bad movies through MST3K.  Eventually, we would collect all available MST3K episodes on DVD. 

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