The Creature

AKA: The Titan Find

A geological research company heads to Titan after getting reports from their own people of some sort of extraordinary find on the cold Saturn moon. However, when the expedition gets there, not only does their ship land on unstable ground and crash, but they also discover that a competing company has already arrived and likely staked out the area. With no other choice, they head to the other ship in search of assistance, but find the ship empty with no crew to be found. Instead, they stumble upon a mysterious alien creature with a bad case of the munchies. Quickly running out of power and air, the surviving crew finds themselves suddenly forced into survival mode if they want to make it off the small moon alive.

Oh, lookie, yet another blatant Alien knock-off. Whoopie doo. I swear there are dozens upon dozens of these, all with varying degrees of success, competence and star power. Creature’s claim to fame seems to be that it features some early special effects from Robert and Dennis Skotak, who would later go on to work on Aliens, and the other is that, for some unfathomable reason, it stars Klaus Kinski, which honestly seems like a weird film choice for him, but then again the dude was known for being crazy, so what the hell do I know. Beyond that though, the film looks to only be a notch or two above your typical Made-for-TV movie as far as quality goes, and is little more than what you would likely expect from a cheesy space horror you caught on cable at 2am. So yes, depending on your mood it’s either going to be dreck, or cheesy, space-y goodness… Space Cheese, if you will.

Not that I’m in any way opposed to Space Cheese, mind you. If you’ve at all been paying attention to this blog then you’ll know it’s basically dedicated to all things filled with cheesy goodness. Heck, I’m not even opposed to the knock-off part (those can be fun.) But what I do at least hope for in my cheesy knock-off is that they’re fun, or at the very least, not boring. One would think that would be an easy hurdle to step over at a leisurely pace, but clearly it is not, because Creature fails on both counts. Oh, it’s got a couple of good bits to it, don’t get me wrong. I did at least find the way the alien mind-controls people to be highly creepy. But most of the film’s fun ends up being muted by the formulaic plot and plodding pacing. The latter of which is particularly vexing, because it starts out with a lot of promise, what with a couple of bloody deaths and an exploding space station. But by the time they force you to watch the entire sequence of the expedition ship landing on the moon you start to get an inkling of what’s to come, and before long you’re forced to sit through a lot of needlessly long walking and corridor sneaking sequences. And you know what, bless its cheap little heart, the film tries to inject tension into these scenes, really it does, but they’re so predictable and poorly acted that it really feels like a lost cause. Couple that with characters making increasingly annoying and needlessly dumb decisions and it just becomes an exercise in frustration. After that one smart guy from the beginning of the film voices reluctance to mess with the container holding the creepy alien being, because by doing so they run the risk of the creature being “very pissed and very hungry”, the IQ level of everyone else just nosedives from there. It’s so frustrating knowing that that one moment was as close as the film got to self-awareness, and that if that ONE dude hadn’t given into peer pressure, he could have saved over a dozen brainless idiots from an unnecessarily early demise.

This is all your fault, Howard. I hope you’re proud of yourself.

Then there’s this film’s aesthetic, which, you know, the film’s tagline reads, “First you die…then the terror begins!”, but it might as well have been, “Bask in the terror of Blue Filter Night!”, because that’s pretty much solely what this movie is filmed in: Dank, blue-filtered bleakness. And you know what, I applaud them for picking a mood and rolling with it, I really do. Good for them for sticking to some kind of artistic vision and all that crap. But the problem is that the quality of most of the prints of this movie you’re going to find online are all, well, garbage. It looks like they’re mostly based on VHS transfers, so not only are they extra grainy, but they’re also extra dark, and that coupled with the blue filter the camera constantly uses makes everything extra hard to see. Especially considering that most everything is already filmed with high shadow contrast to help hide all the film’s low-budget deficiencies. Meaning there’ll be several times where you’ll see something, and you’ll know it’s important based on how the characters react, but you can’t exactly commiserate with their reaction, because you can’t actually see what it is they’re reacting to. Then you’ll run across other odd transfers like the one on Tubi TV that happens to be widescreen, yet the picture looks to be both somehow smooshed together and oddly cropped, because there are a couple of scenes where the characters heads seem to be cut off at the top or completely out of frame. It’s really very odd. So if you do want to watch this, do yourself a favor and try to find a decent print first.

Then there’s the special effects, which are kind of a mixed bag. I mean, when they’re good, they’re very good, and you can see why Robert and Dennis Skotak ended up landing Aliens and doing a good job on it. The matte paintings are simple, but effective, and the miniatures they used are functional and look good for what they are. But the rest of your enjoyment is going to be determined by what print you watch, because while the gore effects are good, if you’re watching a lower-quality print then it’s going to be hard to see most of them. And then there’s the monster, which, I’m not gonna lie, I wasn’t too impressed with. The monster is really one of those things that ends up being 10x more effective the less you see of it. Because once you get a good look at this thing it looks…well, pretty sad, actually. Like some kind of deformed lovechild of Alien and the original creature design for the alien from Predator before they replaced it with the much cooler dread-lock/vagina faced thing. It’s just so weird and pitiful looking that it’ll only take you 2 seconds to figure out why the filmmakers didn’t want you to see more of this thing before the finale, and then wish you never have to gaze at it again just so you can stop feeling sorry for it.

Oh my god, you poor little SOB.

So yeah, Creature…exists, I suppose. It’s got some ups and it’s got some downs, but it ultimately feels like the kind of movie that’s trying too hard. Like, it’s the kind of thing that feels like it wants very hard to be a feature film, but would have made for a fun TV movie instead. And you know, if they’d cut out some of the blood and the forced sex scenes that were obviously added just because someone thought the film needed more “cred”, then that’s what this would be. But no, they had higher aspirations that they couldn’t quite hit. At the very least, it would have helped immensely if the acting had been better and the characters had not been quite so dumb. If just THAT had been more polished, the movie would have been far more successful. I mean, seriously writers, you really mean to tell me that on a spacecraft full of scientists who have the knowledge and experience to hotwire a ship, that the best method the survivors could think of to check to see if the creature they had just electrocuted was really and truly dead, was for them to lightly tap it with their boot? Twice? Really? You might as well have told them to poke it with a stick. It’s so stupid that I’m still not sure whether or not I should laugh or cry. Which pretty much sums up the whole film. If you’ve got a sense of humor about these things, then you’re going to have a blast. But if you choose to watch this and you’re a more serious horror/sci-fi nerd, then I cannot be responsible for the amount of hair you end up pulling out of your head.

Creature is available on a variety of streaming services.

Creature is also available on DVD and Bluray.

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