Creature: Adult Sci-Fi Cinema for Juvenile Tastes

Creature AKA Titan Find (1985) Directed by William Malone. Starring Wendy Schaal, Stan Ivar, Diane Salinger, Klaus Kinski and Lyman Ward

No doubt about it Ridley Scott's Alien was THE seminal horror SF classic for modern audiences. Likewise the film industry has spawned many clones and imitators  as well. To be fair Alien had borrowed elements from other movies but not so much as it's clone ripoff Creature. This gem from 1985 not only manages to heavily emulate the look and feel of Ridley's movie it also takes liberal doses from other films of the genre as well.

The plot revolves around the rivalry of two major corporations (with narration provided by the late Don Lafontaine, probably the biggest name in the whole film) competing for the development of space and space travel. The first is the American company NTI,  the other the West German Richter Corporation (Back in the days when people thought that East and West Germany would never be unified entities).

I need you to sit on this. No not
my tube that tube!!!

In the opening teaser we see two astronauts from the American firm sporting space suits that look very much like the ones used in Kubrik's 2001. The two explorers find an Alien lab on the sixth Moon of Saturn known as Titan and one cannot help but notice that the set looks oddly familiar... Then it hits you, this is the Krell laboratory from Forbidden Planet. The scene unfolds as the two find an alien canister with an ugly beastie seemly in suspended animation residing inside it. One of the astronauts decides to get a picture of the object. It should be noted that the camera he uses even resembles the one used in 2001 to photograph the monolith. He asks his partner to sit on the container for a sense of scale and... needless to say that this ends with our victim suffering from the worst case of hemorrhoids ever as the creature escapes the tube and decides to have a bite to eat.

The scene then goes on to emulate the opening of Alien complete with creepy new age flute music and the obligatory panoramic  shot of the vastness of space (Even though the events really only take place within our solar system).

Space Station Concorde,
just before it's insurance
premium goes up.

All does not go well and later the space craft is detected by the crew space station Concorde, and when they get a brief visual of the pilot he seemingly looks like one of aliens from John Carpenter's They Live or Steve Buscemi take your pick.

The ship collides with the station and soon an expedition is launched to Titan to find out what went wrong... and to provide more victims for the movie. The NTI corp sends the spaceship Shenandoah to investigate crewed by Capt. Mike Davison (Stan Ivar), Helmsman Liz Sladen... Liz Sladen? wasn't she the actress who played Sarah Jane Smith on Dr. Who? (Wendy Schaal), specialist Jon Fennel (Robert Jaffe), um... uh... Susan Delambre... whose only purpose is to serve as ship's woman with active libido, eating fetish (She has a habit of nibbling on sandwiches and chocloates) and first victim (Marie Lauren), Dr. Wendy Oliver (a very skittish Annette McCarthy), Corporate sleazeball David Perkins (Lyman Ward AKA Ferris Bueller's dad), and security officer Melanie Bryce (Diane Salinger).

The sets of the Shenandoah look a lot like those of the Nostromo as the crew is briefed of the upcoming mission, strangely seated on the floor (I guess the budget didn't allow for chairs in this scene).

Wendy Schaal as Sarah Jane Smith...
aah... I mean Liz Sladen

There are many tips of the hat to other movies that came before ( Bryce wears a black jacket similar to the ones used by the crew of Planet of the Vampires), and when crossing the vast distance of space Sladen mentions to her captain that a commander doesn't need brains just a good loud voice which is dialogue directly lifted from Forbidden Planet.

While this is happening the captain points out the the book Miss Sladen is reading will rot her brain... and the novel happens to be Scared to Death which also happens to be the title of the directors first movie.

The creature... from Scared to Death,
as "Sir Not Appearing in this Film".

At this point the film starts to lapse into self parody but it goes on. Needless to say the ship touches down on Titan and suffers damage from the landing. The captain suggest getting help from the East Germans who have beaten the Americans to the punch, but Ferris' dad refuses imitating the role of Burke, the company man from Aliens.

The plot then shifts into It the Terror From Beyond Space as the crew while investigating the Richter Corp ship runs into the beastie, but not before Susan finds and eats a piece of German chocolate that she finds in the lab (Yes this does actually happen). Mind you this is before she finds all the dead bodies so her appetite is not based on the macabre.

Security officer Melanie Bryce,
tough as nails... probably
why Klaus Kinski got the hots for her.

The crew high tail it out of the ship only to meet Hans Rudy Hofner (Klaus Kinski) a horny East German who develops a thing for security officer Melanie Bryce, much to her dismay. The damaged Shenandoah is slowly running out of air and the only escape is the Richter ship with it's unwanted tenant. There's a great scene with Kinski spouting exposition about the creature all the while eating a sandwich... which sources say at the time of the filming Klaus was actually eating his lunch while doing this scene.

By now the audience finds out that the creature can use the dead bodies of it's victims to draw out and manipulate the survivors (via a parasite link) as astronaut Fennel is duped with the promise of hot sex with a naked Susan whom he thought was dead, he then gets a lovely spider like accessory attached to his noggin.
Meanwhile Hans and Melanie decide to investigate the alien lab where the thing was first found in order to retrieve the air-tanks off of his dead teammates, they find Susan's body and are attacked by her zombie corpse.
 

Hans casually has a snack while
explaining the horrors that
await the intrepid crew.

 Fennel later tricks the crew into going back to the East German ship saying he has repaired the damage and the creature is nowhere to be found. when asked about his disappearance and new found head injury he casually makes up some story about wanting to repair the ship and slipping hitting his melon on some service conduit or something. And the crew believes him!!! I don't know about you but I'd be asking to see a severed alien head as proof before I trusted a story this thin. Mind you this is an 80's horror flick so you could tell the crew that the monster is simply homesick and in a show of good will and rehabilitation has offered the crew an invitation to lemonade and butter tarts and they will still fall into the trap.

Can you recommend a
good plastic surgeon?
I cut myself shaving.

Fennel tricks Doc Oliver to go with him to engineering. She finds that he has lured her into a trap and as she struggles to escape she winds up ripping the skin off his face. he then introduces her to the alien for a snack. Boy that's a date that doesn't end well. Fennel's head explodes in a meat-bag moneyshot as Ferris' dad (Perkins AKA Lyman Ward) decides to blow his ugly mug away.

Well the crew is in  tight fix now as Sladen waits alone aboard the Shenandoah, unaware of the fates of her other team-mates, trying to repair the ship. Klaus, now a zombie attacks her and decides to drag her body back to the German ship to draw out Perkins and Capt. Davison. Lucky for them he doesn't turn Liz into one of his minions and they manage to save her.

If only my son Ferris
were here he'd know what to do.
But he's at home sick.

So role call so far, Capt Davison, Liz Sladen and Dave Perkins are left on board in one section with the creature firmly entrenched in the engineering section. This is a problem because that the part of the ship that makes it go. Suddenly Liz remembers a scene from the movie The Thing, (NOT the John Carpenter version but the Christian Nyby one. The Thing from Another World) in which the alien was killed by electrocution. The plan works and the scene is almost frame for frame of the movie that it copies. Well the Creature is cooked but not out as he kidnaps Miss Sladen as she goes to check to see if the monster is really dead (Too bad they never learned about the rule of the double tap).

Fortunately again Miss Sladen is spared by the alien and kept hostage to lure the last remaining crew members out (or to be kept as a sex slave I'm not sure how this monster's mind works).

Perkins decides to try to enter through the cargo bay to lure the creature out and blow it up with explosives leaving Davison to rescue Sladen.

And I would have succeeded too
if not for you meddling kids!!

Perkins enters the cargo bay only to find that the hatch has been opened and runs into the alien, Davison rescues Sladen and goes below to see how Ferris' dad is doing. Perkins falls prey to the monster but manages to arm the explosives before he dies, they push the monster out of the airlock but find it has managed to keep it from closing and is too close to the ship. Davison sacrifices himself by physically kicking the beast out but the bomb fails to go off (Cheap commie crap). Bryce shows up at the last minute and armed with a rifle blows the creature to kingdom come. All ends well and there is no indication of a possibility for a sequel.

Did you guys see that giant black
Monolith?

As far as B-movies go Creature stands alone in that it is not in the "So bad it's good" category nor is it a romping good time. It seems to sandwich between good and bad making it mediocre. The effects and model works are decent enough being helmed by the Skotak Brothers who later would work with Cameron on Aliens and Titanic and the performances are not bad (The best being Kinski). The real fun in Creature is catching all the science fiction in-jokes and nods to other movies.

One thing I found was that the backpacks used by the American crew look a lot like those used in the Sunrise anime SPT Layzner. The movie pre-dates the anime by a year so there is the possibility that they were influenced by this movie. I probably haven't found all the in-jokes yet but that's the reason for owning a copy on DVD.