Review of Creature

Creature (1985)
5/10
A blatant Alien rip-off, not bad for what it is I suppose.
21 December 2012
Warning: Spoilers
Creature is set in the far future where two rival companies are competing heavily in space in search of new materials & advanced manufacturing techniques in the as yet unused resource of the universe. The German firm of Richter Dynamics & the American firm NTI are battling it out for commercial supremacy, the location is Titan the largest moon that orbits Saturn where a geological research team from NTI have found an alien spaceship & are examining strange like capsules when one breaks open & something nasty & alive attacks & kills the team. A few weeks later the teams spaceship crashes into an orbiting space-station, NTI recruit a new team to travel to Titan & investigate what happened & lay claim to the alien artifacts. Arriving at Titan the NTI team discover that a rival team from Richter Dynamics has already landed, having damaged their spaceship on landing on Titan they look to ask the German team for help but find them all dead except Hans Hofner (Klaus Kinski) who warns them of an alien creature that has already attacked & killed one of them & which will stop at nothing to kill the rest...

Co-written, co-produced & directed by William Malone this was written & filmed under the title Titan Find which is what it was released as here in the UK when it surprisingly played cinemas back in 1985 before hitting VHS & more recently DVD & can be found in bargain bins all over the country, Creature is a blatant rip-off of the classic sci-fi horror film Alien (1979) & it never really tires to be anything else so in that context I didn't think it was too bad. At just over 90 minutes long the script feels a little padded, the build-up is maybe takes a little long & there's too many scenes of people walking around very dark corridors but that's expected in this sort of film. There's no great reasoning behind what the creature does, it takes control of a few people with parasite creatures but to what end I am not sure, is it after food? Does it just want to kill everyone? Wouldn't it be better letting a couple of humans get back to Earth and hide on the spaceship with them? It would have an entire planet to eat then rather than just a handful of people. Also, at the end how can that get survive in Titan's atmosphere without a spacesuit? No-one else in the film could & one character states that's it minus 77 on the surface which would have surely frozen the guy in seconds? The character's don't help the film much, they are all one dimensional & are only there to either be killed off or to recite the necessary exposition to keep the audience informed that they are all in danger or emphasise that the air is running out or to argue about how best to deal with the situation & so forth. None of them have perceptible personalities if you know what I mean. So while Creature is a bit predictable & does drag in a couple of places it's watchable enough, obviously if you like sci-fi horror films anyway you might like it more than those who don't but you could do a lot worse.

Creature looks surprisingly good, the special effects aren't to the striking levels of Alien but then Creature never had the talents of H.R. Giger designing it. The creature here is kept in the shadows for the majority of the time but is shown in full at the end & again the Alien influence is noticeable. There's some impressive effects, from the space & planet shots to the model work which really isn't that bad at all considering, the electrical effect when the creature is electrocuted at the end is terrible though & while the sets are alright they are a little dark. There's a decent amount of gore here as well, a head is blown up, a face is ripped off, necks are bitten, heads are ripped off & there's plenty of dead bodies lying around. One area where the original Alien beats Creature is in the suspense & horror departments, director Malone fails to generate any real scares & the film as a whole is a bit too predictable.

With a supposed budget of about $750,000 this apparently made nearly five million at the US box office, it has good production values & looks decent. The acting isn't great, the only name of note to me is the notoriously difficult Klaus Kinski who has a small cameo which he probably filmed in a day or two. Marie Laurin takes her spacesuit off on the surface of Titan & is completely naked in order to seduce someone.

Creature is an Alien rip-off that owes a little to The Thing (1982) as well, I was impressed with the overall look of Creature & it's a passable time waster but just don't expect anything original. I quite liked it for what it was but I don't think I would be in any hurry to see it again.
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