The B-Team here includes everybody's favourite (actually my own third favourite, after Brinke Stevens and Michelle Bauer) clothes-allergic '80s scream queen Linnea Quigley. La Quigs is playing the role of Blanca, and unlike the big green guy from Street Fighter II you might not actually be averse to this one leaping on you, wrapping her legs around your waist and getting a little bitey. With her are leader Jake (Richard Hawkins), meathead Butch (Ken Abraham), bookish Jesse (Michael Aranda) and Kate, 34C-22-33 (Kim McKamy, who a mere three years later would reinvent herself as porn starlet and AVN and XRCO Hall of Famer Ashlyn Gere).
The gang take time out from stalking moodily along abandoned train tracks to a pulsing sub-John Carpenter and oh-so-brilliantly-'80s synth score to take refuge from an oncoming acid rain storm in some ruins. Surrounded, like the Monty Python gang, by film (in this case stock footage of stormclouds and rain) they decide to explore their new temporary accommodation further and discover an underground bunker consisting of a network of tunnels and rooms. This rabbit warren is a deserted scientific facility belonging to the Research For A Better Tomorrow project, and even ill omens such as a severed head in the laboratory and obvious signs that something has escaped from one of the experimental cages can't deter the crew from making use of such amenities as a working hot shower. Because did you really think we'd get more than fifteen minutes in before Linnea took her clothes off?
Jesse manages to access the lab's computer files (which bear such personnel in-joke names as Forrest Ackerman, Roger Corman and Charles Band) and discovers that the absent eggheads had been working on the synthesis and recombination of amino acids (primordial soup, from which all life springs). The results of this particular folly of hubristic science include mutant rats the size of small dogs and a mutant creature resembling a betusked Giger xenomorph. Cue some very familiar Ridley Scott-esque creeping around ventilation shafts as the male members (tee hee) of the squad meet successive gory demises, leaving Blanca and Kate as the last girls standing. After Kate succumbs to the mutagenic effects of a giant rat bite which reduces the star of Put It In Gere from a perfect 10 to "nice body, butterface", Blanca has to tangle with her friend - now a prosthetics covered zombie mutant (whenever i think of "Ashlyn Gere in latex", this isn't it) - in a girl fight to the death. It's less sexy than you might imagine.
Having been set up as the surviving 'final girl' of the movie, we are thrown a sudden curve ball by director DeCoteau as Blanca finds that Jake isn't dead but has been stashed away in the creature's nest-cum-larder before she is suddenly and ignominiously feasted upon by the monster. Waking Jake understandably exits, pursued by beast, until he is cornered in the complex's supplies store where he is tossed around like ragdoll physics until he injects the thing with a handy hypodermic of... bleach? Acid? Something. Then as he crawls away from the scene of battle, we get a Zilla-style swerve as a baby mutant resembling a cross between the fertility drug frightmare of Larry Cohen's 1974 It's Alive and the demonic Selwyn of Peter Jackson's Braindead (1992) crawls from the creatures corpse dragging its dripping umbilical cord behind it. This fanged hellspawn mounts a frenzied assault but fails to reach it's five minute birth anniversary before Jake garrottes it with its umbilicus.
But of course it's not dead, because final shot cliffhanger.
Relatively well-shot in twelve days on a meagre budget by DeCoteau - who would go on to other such genre delights as Nightmare Sisters (1988), Dr Alien (1989) and Puppet Master III: Toulon's Revenge (1991) as well as hardcore homosexual hot stuff like Men of Action II (1989) - Creepozoids is a breezy 70 minutes of lightweight fun with a bit of T&A and a splash of gore. Certainly not the peak of the genre but not a waste of its brisk runtime, any aficionados of the low budget end of the VHS era should find something to enjoy.
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