89) Creature (1985) - A Nostalgic Horror Rental

"Whatever's in here, it's liable to be very pissed and hungry."

Director

William Malone

Cast

Stan Ivar - Capt. Mike Davison

Wendy Schaal - Beth Sladen

Lyman Ward - David Perkins

Diane Salinger - Melanie Bryce

Annette McCarthy - Dr. Wendy Oliver

Marie Laurin - Susan Delambre

Klaus Kinski - Hans Hofner

Also known as The Titan Find, the1985 science fiction horror movie Creature is a movie I've stumbled upon so many times since my days of perusing VHS covers during at the movie rental store back in the 1990s.

While some movies, perhaps too many of them, have stupid endings, Creature has a stupid beginning.

It begins with two dopey (unintentionally dopey of course, but when is dopiness intentional?) geological researchers, working for the American Multinational Corp., also know as NTI, are sniffing around an ancient alien laboratory somewhere on Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

While meandering around and looking like they're actually doing something important, they find a pod with an alien egg inside. And inside the egg, much to their surprise, is an alien. 

While sticking their helmeted faces right up to the pod window, one of these researchers sees the creature move.  

Though it naturally freaks him out, the other researcher blows off any potential threat so he can get a picture of this pod with the other researcher in the shot for the sake of size ratio. 

After the researcher notices a small crack in the egg, the other guy asks him to sit on top of the pod because...just for fun, I guess.

He's even more hesitant to do something that stupid and completely predictable for the audience. Regardless, he sits on the egg pod. 

What happens next shouldn't surprise anyone, nor even be called a "spoiler." The alien breaks out of the shell and  kills them both. The Marx brothers could have pulled off a better and more realistic opening scene. 

By the way, there's a sex scene in less than 15 minutes from the start. It's random, so I'll mention it just as randomly as it appears. 

After several months pass from the death of those two researchers, NTI sends out another ship over to Titan called the Shenandoah. The crew consists of a captain who's played by the guy who played John Carter on Little House on the Prairie (Stan Ivar), Simone from Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (Diane Salinger), Ferris Bueller's dad from Ferris Bueller's Day Off (Lyman Ward), this one lady who appeared on Night Court once (no, not Markie Post. I'm talking about Annette McCarthy), and Marie Laurin who previously played "Denise" on the Three's Company episode "Upstairs, Downstairs, Upstairs." It's a stellar cast! 

Actually, it was pretty cool to see Diane Salinger in something other than Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. 

Flying out in space, they all realize that it's much more than a hunch that this group must somehow form a family... LOL. No, seriously, while orbiting, they pick up a distress signal from the moon. 

They determine it's coming from a West German multinational corporation called Richter Dynamics. 

So, they land on an unstable area. The ground underneath caves in and the ship and crew fall into a cavern underground. 

This team of TV and movie has-beens attempts to contact anyone for help but find their radio doesn't work.

The next step is to send out a search party for these Germans and their ship which they eventually find. On board, the rescue party finds the bodies of the German crew. 

Suddenly, the alien creature kills one of the rescuers - Susan Delambre (Marie Laurin) - as she failed to catch up with the others who ran back to their ship.

When they get back to the Shenandoah, shocked and not sure what to do next, they find one of the Germans, Hans Hofner (Klaus Kinski) has snuck aboard.

Hofner explains how his crew was killed by these aliens, which he says were buried along with other life-forms from around space as part of some weird intergalactic exhibition. 

Since no one else is sure about what to do, Hofner says there's explosives back on his ship. He suggests they go back and attempt to retrieve them. But no one else is up to it. 

Soon, the bodies of the alien's victims start returning under the control of parasites.

One of the crew members, Jon Fennel (Robert Jaffe) sees Delambre alive outside the ship.

When he rushes out to retrieve her, she takes all of her clothes off and stands there naked in front of him.

She then removes his helmet which kills him. After that, she puts an alien parasite on his head. 

As the crew heads over to the Richter, they find Fennel onboard bandaged up and alive. Capt. Davison (Stan Ivar) is insistent Fennel be taken to see Dr. Oliver (Annette McCarthy) for a medical examination.

Fennel goes, only to accompany Dr. Oliver to the engineering part of the ship to feed her to the creature.

Davison and Perkins, for some reason, go check on Fennel. The scene they find is horrific. Sadly, it's too late to save Dr. Oliver, but Perkin's shoots Fennel and blows his head off. 

Basically, everyone runs around trying not to be the next meal for the alien, which we barely get to see, while wondering who is or isn't under its parasitic control. 

Creature is an Alien knock-off that meets John Carpenter's 1982 classic The Thing. This movie feels long, drawn out, and pretentious. 

Ferris Bueller's dad becomes the creature's meal in Creature.

The alien remains illusive from the audience. We barely get to see it. It's either too quick, obscured by shadow and darkness, or just hidden out of sight. I don't mind a little build up to bolster and audience's apprehension and fear. But it can be overdone, as it is in Creature. Just show us the alien!

Before I got to the end of the movie, I was certain that Salinger's character would reveal herself as a robot just as Ian Holm's character, Ash, did in Alien. Her performance is nothing short of robotic. 

I found out after watching this movie, that the film's writer, Neil Gaiman told "Imagine Magazine" (July, 1985-issue #28) that Creature is a rip-off of Alien. Despite this admission, (spoiler) she's not a robot.

Even before I found this out, it was completely obvious Creature pulls so much influence from Alien.

Director William Malone has made some horror movies that are mediocre at best such as Scared to Death, the Tales from the Crypt episode "Only Skin Deep," FeardotCom (that movie is less than mediocre),  and the 1999 remake House on Haunted Hill - a movie that makes up for its lack of scares with unsettling and gross images. Creature definitely falls to the bottom of his list of already average titles. Unlike House on Haunted Hill, the gore and attempt at inciting fear don't help his movie, Creature. 

I was bored by this dry and stale movie. Throughout the film, I waited for either the alien or the end to show up. I knew one of them had to come around eventually.