Creature (1985) — Triskaidekafiles

CREATURE

WRITERS: William Malone and Alan Reed

DIRECTOR: William Malone

STARRING: Stan Ivar as Mike Davison
Wendy Schaal as Beth Sladen
Lyman Ward as David Perkins
Robert Jaffe as John Fennel
Diane Salinger as Melanie Bryce
Annette McCarthy as Dr. Wendy H. Oliver
Marie Laurin as Susan Delambre
Klaus Kinski as Hans Rudy Hofner

QUICK CUT: A group of people are terrorized when an animal escapes from a zoo.

THE MORGUE

Davison - The captain of the Shenandoah, in a relationship with Beth Sladen, and pretty much your average spaceship captain. Smart, friendly, looks out for the safety of the crew first.

Perkins - The liason for NTI that is partnered with Davison. Essentially the captain’s boss in the corporation and the man in charge, but the captain can supersede Perkins’ authority should the need arise. He tends towards corporate interests first, but is very much the opposite of the usual evil corporate stooge.

Sladen - Davison’s second in command, and love interest. She’s technical and does most of the electrical work the team needs.

Bryce - The security officer provided by NTI, should they encounter any problems while on their missions. The strong silent type, who doesn’t say much and takes little shit.

Hofner - A German from another vessel that the crew come across. He’s a bit of a perv, very handsy with Bryce, and he seems a bit scattershot. But considering what he’s been through, that’s understandable.

You! You're not Sylvia! You're one of the Kung Fu Creatures on the Rampage!

TRISK ANALYSIS: Welcome back, Triskelions! After our visit to see what was Within the Rock, I thought I'd stick with the alien monster theme, and take a look at an earlier Alien knock off movie, called simply, Creature. This is by William Malone, who also did Scared to Death, which we talked about a bit ago. So hop on board for this Star Trisk, and let's head to Titan to see what we find.

The movie opens up with some text and narration setting the stage for this future flung tale. All you need to know is there are two corporations fighting it out for space supremacy; NTI, representing the United States, and Richter Dynamics, representing Germany.

On Saturn's moon, Titan, an NTI research team have found ruins left by an ancient civilization. Who were they? Where did they go? Not important! What is important is that they left behind all their pets, in giant cubes of platin...no wait, that was the last movie.

Most of the canisters are broken, but the scientists do manage to find one unbroken, and document their find.

One of the astronauts investigates the casket, and thinks he sees the creature move, and it spooks him. They brush it off as just a trick of the light, but they also cracked the casing when he dropped his flashlight.

They prep to get photographs of the find, but whatever is inside oozes out through the crack, and quickly murders the two astronauts.

Off camera, survivors from the mission fly their ship away, but lose control, and crash into a space station. NTI sends a second crew to Titan for retrieval and to find out what happened.

We meet the crew, and it's the usual sort of stuff; blue collars being chaperoned by corporate interests.

They soon reach Titan, and discover another ship has already beaten them to the location, a ship from Richter.

CAP: And remember, it's corporate policy that if you see a strange alien object., you must shove your face into it.

Our crew doesn't make the best landing, and their ship suffers serious damage. Not enough to compromise hull integrity, but enough to make them question if they're going to get back home.

They contact the Richter ship, but since there's no response, they decide to suit up and head over, because there may be interference or damage.

Once they reach the ship, Perkins takes security chief Bryce and a few others aboard, leaving the rest to cool their space heels outside. Which shouldn't be a problem with how cold things are in space.

The team explores the ship, finding no survivors, and a whole lotta dead bodies. Delambre runs back to the rest, and warns them that something killed the crew, and they make to leave the ship.

On the way out, the creature shows up, and they shift gears from mosey to run, and make for the exit. But along the way, one of the security doors closes too quickly, trapping Delambre, and she gets caught by the creature. The rest of the team make it off the Richter spacecraft.

As they get back to the Shenandoah, the crew settles in, and processes everything that just happened, with Sladen taking it probably the hardest.

In her chambers, Bryce gets out of her suit, and is surprised when an unexpected passenger grabs her. Some security officer she is. Worf would be ashamed.

The man that showed up is the lone survivor of the Richter expedition, Hans Hofner, and he explains what went down.

Klaus Exposinski tells them they brought the creature's pod aboard their ship, not realising it was alive, it killed his entire crew, and now it's coming for them.

If you’re cold, they’re cold, let them inside.

The Americans want to go back to the German ship and systematically hunt it down, but Hofner knows better what they're up against. He wants to do everything to just get away.

Meanwhile, Fennel is visited by the supposedly dead Delambre, who lures him back out into the caves. He chases her down and just to make sure he stays interested, she completely disrobes and gives us some gratuitous nudity. Great, now we're Species.

She removes his helmet, and they start making out...or she does, and he starts choking on the lack of oxygen. And if that didn't do him in, she slaps a headcrab on his face for good measure.

Back aboard the Shenandoah, they realise Fennel and an EVA suit are missing, so Perkins takes Hofner and Bryce to go try and round up their wayward crew.

While they trek through the caves again, Sladen gets their communications back up and running, just in time for Fennel to send them a message.

Fennel lets them know the German ship has plenty of air, and they can probably get it running to escape this moon and totally not take the creature with them.

I am making this message of my own free will, I am not under duress.

They notice Fennel is sitting a little weird, but he brushes it off as saying he pulled something trying to open a heavy bulkhead door. But we the audience get to see that the headcrab is piloting him like cordyceps.

Meanwhile, Bryce and Hofner find the alien collection again, but while Hofner pays his respects for his fallen crewmates, they also find Delambre, who attacks them.

The rest of the crew suit up, suspicious at best, and make their way to the Richter ship. They leave Sladen behind, to do what she can on their ship, just in case something goes wrong.

This thing looks like it’s about to drop off some GoBots.

Davison and the rest make it to the other ship, and Fennel has his head suspiciously bandaged up. He's eager to get the ship running, so heads down to engineering. Davison insists the doctor look at the injury, and she follows down to engineering to do just that.

They make it to engineering, and oops! The lights are out. Doctor Oliver heads into the room, while Fennel goes to get the lights on. Or so he says.

Wendy pokes around in the murky not quite total darkness, and starts running into dangling corpses. Fennel shows up to attack her, and she rips his face off.

Meanwhile, Perkins and Davison are searching the ship for signs of unexpected life, when Davison suddenly realises, hey wait. We're sweating our butts off, but Fennel was cool as a cucumber! Which is...kinda weaksauce evidence of something being wrong, but whatever moves the plot along, I guess.

The best part of this is that they cut to the two guys just as the doctor is screaming, so it LOOKS like it's gonna be a "Did you hear that...?" moment, but no. I kinda like the doing the unexpected though. Of course, they do the scream and “Did you hear that…?” moment about twenty minutes later, but ah well.

So they hurry down to engineering, just in time to see the titular Creature nomming down on the doctor.

Oh, hey! Gimmie a sec, you caught me right as I had a bit of food in my mouth!"

Faceless Fennel shows up to fight the boys, and after tossing and tussling a bit, Perkins shows up and blows his head off. And it's a really solid head explosion. I regret not sharing it.

Back at the American ship whose name I don't want to try and spell again, someone is mucking about, which keeps shutting things down on Sladen.

She starts getting ready to head to the other ship, when she runs into Hofner, possessed by the brainslugs, and looking terrible.

Fortunately, she manages to get off the ship, but Hofner isn't far behind, as they play a cat and mouse through the alien caves.

The boys aren't having much luck either; Davison is trying to raise Sladen back at the ship, but obviously she's not availablem to answer your call. Also, when they try and leave the ship, the discover all their suits are damaged, so they have no where to go.

Beth passes out before she can make it to the German vessel, but Klaus carries her the rest of the way, and the boys let them in.

Hofner attacks them, and after a brief scuffle, he gets shot, and they rip the brainslug off his face, solving that problem.

Our three survivors head to the bridge to catch their breath, regroup, and figure out what to do next. Sladen suggests electrocuting the creature like in the old Earth film, the Thing from Another Planet.

Probably smart to reference THAT version and not the modern, contemporary to this movie, version. Also, they don't specifically namecheck the movie, but I love just saying "a carrot from another planet".

The Creature is one step ahead of them though, and starts reducing life support and opening doors. They quickly get a move on, do some rewiring, and lure the creature into position.

And that is why we don’t stick a fork in the microwave, kids.

With 20 minutes still to go, the movie obviously isn't over yet, but the creature plays possum when they poke it.

The trio start getting the ship ready to leave, and once Sladen is alone, it rises up like Michael Myers to attack her.

It captures her and takes her to it's lair in engineering, and uh, okay. So the creature has killed almost everyone on sight and brainslugged it, but all of a sudden it leaves Beth alive to play with it's food?

The boys plot a plan to sneak into the backdoor of engineering, and Perkins finds a bunch of explosives. He gets ready to rig up a Bugs Bunny ass trap with a net and bombs, over a hatch that ldeads outside.

While Davison grabs Sladen, the creature grabs Perkins, and starts chowing down. See, now why didn't he do that with Beth??

But while the creature is busy nomming, Perkins points to the hatch release, telling Daivson to do it! DO IT NAOW!

So, he does, and they get dumped onto the surface of the moon. Or well, the surface of the crater of the moon, but you know what I mean.

But the main door is open, and the creature tries to get back inside, as the detonator counts down. Davison tries to shut the door, but it's not working for plot contrivance reasons. So, he jump kicks the creature outside, flying with it.

It looks bleak for Davison, but Bryce shows up out of nowhere, still alive, and shoots at the creature to keep it away until it blows up.

When something you eat gives you heartburn.

Bryce grabs Davison and hurries him back to the ship before he dies from lack of oxygen. If anyone is wondering, they DO establish the moon has a small, but very thin, atmosphere, so this isn't as impossible as it looks from my summation.

They ask where Bryce got off to, where has she been, and she simply says she got lost, so they get to have a good laugh over all their dead friends as they leave this plot behind.

TRISK ASSESSMENT

Video: I watched Vinegar Syndrome’s recent release of the movie, and there’s two versions; the original theatrical cut, which they upscaled from a very good copy of the film, and the director’s cut, which…is not a very good copy of the film. It still looks okay, but it can be very dark, and looks nowhere near as good as the theatrical.

Audio: Some very solid audio, too.

Sound Bite: “I got lost.”

Body Count: Besides the onscreen deaths, we get bunches of corpses from the German crew, and probably a few that went boom when the other ship crashed into the space station. This movie has a lot of deaths and reanimations, and I'm not always consistent on which deaths I counted. I tried to keep it at "do we see the death?" with this count, but things get fuzzy. Still, not a bad number.

1 - Four and a half minutes in marks our first death, as Howard gets his ass eaten out.
2 - Susan gets killed by the Creature
3 - Creature!Susan kills John
4 - Oliver gets eaten and decapitated
5 - Creature!Fennel gets his head blowed up.
6 - A reanimated Hofner shows up.
7 - And then Creature!Hofner gets killed when the parasite is removed
8 - Perkins gets killed off camera.
9 - The Creature goes boom

Best Corpse: A number of deaths in this are pretty great, but even those don’t come close to John Fennel getting his face half ripped off, and then getting the whole face exploded.

Blood Type - B+: There’s quite a bit of blood in this, and again, Fennel is a standout. He keeps that ripped fce for a good few minutes. The creature design is…not great, but they keep it hidden just enough, and when it’s just the face, and hands, it works better.

Sex Appeal: Some nekkidity as Delambre lures John to his death.

Drink Up! Every time someone gets headcrabbed.

Movie Review: I dug this, a lot more than I liked Within the Rock, which I still liked. Two different levels of movie. But Creature just has more going on, and there’s not as much sitting around. Within the Rock has some good characters and politicking, but also a lot of sitting and talking. Malone has always been a director whose work I enjoy, in that B movie way, and Creature is no exception. The plot is straightforward, but well executed, and the world just feels so lived in. It has that retro futuristic look of the original Alien movie, and it’s just unique enough in it’s way to not completely be a ripoff. Not a great movie, but a solid three out of five headcrabs.

Entertainment Value: The movie is played fairly straight, with just a touch of humour. Klaus Kinski does bring some added life to the back half of the movie, and his manic performance sells his state of mind. And of course, the blood spurts in this movie are a delight. The kills are a nice showcase, and set this movie above the rest of this era of Alien-alike movies. If you like Alien and Alien like movies, and you haven’t seen this one yet, it’s worth your time, four out of five casks of amontialien