My best friend - and fellow crappy horror movie aficionado - Paul popped down from London the other day for one of our semi-regular film nights.
His viewing suggestion, 1987's Creepozoids, turned out to be an hilariously awful, low-budget, Alien mockbuster-style B-movie treat.
Set in a "futuristic" 1998, six years after a nuclear apocalypse, war is still raging and five of the most useless military deserters find themselves hiding out in a mysterious, abandoned laboratory, unable to leave because of a sudden downpour of acid rain.
Remember when "acid rain" was ubiquitous in sci-fi and post-apocalyptic movies, as shorthand for manmade environmental destruction? Ahh, those were the days!
The "big name star" of Creepozoids is the delightfully scruffy Linnea Quigley (of The Return of the Living Dead and Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers fame) as Blanca, who pairs up with a walking slice of ham called Butch (Ken Abraham).
They are accompanied by the nominal leader of the pack, Jake (Richard Hawkins, who would go on to play an air traffic controller in Close Encounters of The Third Kind), his girlfriend, Kate (Kim McKamy aka adult movie star Ashlyn Gere, whose character quirk appears to be an inability to sit down during meal scenes), and anxious, tech "wiz" Jesse (Michael Aranda). You know he's the "brains" of the group because he wears glasses... and looks a bit like Shane Black's Hawkins from Predator.
Except for a short spell of exterior work to get the characters into the underground bunker, Creepozoids is shot entirely in a warehouse, with a budget of around of £15 (none of which, seemingly, went on the script).
Very quickly our heroes realise they are trapped in the laboratory complex with a large humanoid monster that is clearly a man in a bargain basement xenomorph Halloween costume.
As amusing as that creature is, it's nothing compared to the giant rats that are obviously oversized stuffed toys which the poor actors are having to shake around to simulate the vicious attacks from these killer rodents.
Impressively plotless, what passes for a story in Creepozoids (and, no, I don't know why that's the title) is a series of random encounters that rapidly whittles down our protagonists without really explaining what the creature actually wants.
Bizarrely for a film that barely clocks in with a 72 minute runtime, there's also a lot of padding in writer-director David DeCoteau's film (co-written with Dave Eisenstark under the pen name of Burford Hauser).
Paul and I lost count of the number of times various characters crawled up and down the same, short, piece of gunge-splattered passageway.
Then the final showdown between the last man standing and the big bad monster just felt interminable.
This climactic confrontation also took a strange turn when the monster was injected with a randomly acquired syringe of something-or-other, seemingly killing it only for - moments later - a freakish puppet baby to sprout from its head and continue the aggression.
To add insult to injury, Creepozoids doesn't even deign to have a proper conclusion - instead just suddenly ending on a freezeframe of the mutant baby. Presumably this was to set up the proposed sequel that never materialised.
Perversely, this isn't the worst film we've ever seen - that honour belongs to either Shark Exorcist or the entire Camp Blood franchise - Creepozoids almost gets a pass because it's really an extended vignette rather than an actual movie.
And you can't really knock anything that stars Linnea Quigley.
