My God, what is it?

It’s easy to laugh at some of these old movies, and The Creeping Terror is worse than most. The movie revolves around a bizarre looking monster that is attacking people in a rural county in California. Here’s clip of the monster and the way that people don’t really run away from it. 

 
If you watched more than a few seconds of that, you’ll see the way the creature feeds - it sucks people in through a hole in its front. If the meal is a girl, she screams and kicks her legs. It takes a long time for the creature to get beyond her ass. If it’s a guy, we just see a pair of shoes sticking out. 

I was surprised, though, at the first part of this scene, where the movie establishes the dance hall. 

Here it is. 

 

If you watched for a minute, you saw that we open on a woman in tight, gold, sparkly pants and a bare midriff. She is dancing and having a good time. 

If you convince an attractive woman to dress in tight anything and shake her ass in your movie - whether for love or money - you have a responsibility to show it to the audience, so the camera lingers on her a while. 

Then the camera slowly pulls back, while other couples dance through, doing what I assume is some variety of the Twist. 

As we continue to pull back, we pan to the left to see people at the tables, including little bits of a drama, like a guy who’s too drunk to stand and a couple where the woman won’t dance with a man, who goes off and dances with somebody else. 

The directing of this scene is flawless. Even though there’s no dialog and no character that we’ve met, the scene holds your eye. 

I wondered, as I watched, astonished at this gem in the compost pile, whether I’d misjudged the movie. Maybe there was competent camera work throughout. Maybe, as I watched the rest, I would see other scenes that were just as workmanlike and efficient. 

 No, the rest was indifferent. 

But credit where credit has been earned.