ALL SCI-FI

[Gord Green]

from Wiki:

Creature (also known as The Titan Find and Titan Find) is a 1985 American science fiction horror film directed by William Malone, starring Stan Ivar, Wendy Schaal, Lyman Ward, Annette McCarthy, Robert Jaffe, Diane Salinger, and Klaus Kinski. It features early special effects work by Robert and Dennis Skotak, who would go on to design the special effects for Aliens.



Plot;

In the film's prologue, two geological researchers for the American multinational corporation NTI encounter an ancient alien laboratory on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. In the lab is an egg-like container which is keeping an alien creature alive. The creature emerges and kills the researchers. Two months later, the geologists' spaceship crashes into the space station Concorde in orbit around Earth's Moon, its pilot having died in his seat.



NTI dispatches a new ship, the Shenandoah, to Titan. Its crew, consisting of Captain Mike Davison (Stan Ivar), Susan Delambre (Marie Laurin), Jon Fennel (Robert Jaffe), Dr. Wendy H. Oliver (Annette McCarthy), David Perkins (Lyman Ward) and Beth Sladen (Wendy Schaal), is accompanied by the taciturn security officer Melanie Bryce (Diane Salinger).



While in orbit, the crew locate a signal coming from the moon—the distress call of a ship from the rival West German multinational Richter Dynamics. Their own landing turns disastrous when the ground collapses beneath their landing site, dropping the ship into a cavern and wrecking it. When radio communication fails, a search party is sent out to contact the Germans.

In the West German ship, they find one of the containers from the prologue breached, as well as the dead bodies of the crew. The creature appears and kills Delambre when she lags behind the escaping group. Fennel enters a state of shock at the sight and Bryce sedates him.



When they return to their own ship, the Americans find that one of the West Germans, Hans Rudy Hofner (Klaus Kinski), has snuck aboard. He tells them how his crew was slain by the creature, which was buried with other organisms as part of a galactic menagerie. He proposes returning to his ship to get explosives, but the crew are unwilling to risk it.



It becomes apparent that the creature's undead victims are controlled by the creature through parasites. Unsupervised in the medbay, Fennel sees the undead Delambre through a porthole and follows her outside.



She strips naked, and he stands transfixed while she removes his helmet. He asphyxiates, and then she attaches an alien parasite to his head. Now under alien control, Fennel sends a transmission to his crewmates, inviting them over to the German ship. Hofner and Bryce are sent to get some air tanks for the Shenandoah and stand guard over it, while the rest of the crew go over to the Richter ship.



Hofner and Bryce stop over at the menagerie on their way, and are attacked by Delambre, who has had a parasite attached earlier. The rest of the crew go over to the Richter ship, and find Fennel with a bandage on his head to conceal his parasite. Davison insists that medical officer Oliver examine his head, so Fennel has her accompany him to the engineering quarters to feed her to the creature. Davison and Perkins notice Fennel doesn't sweat and go check on them. They are too late to rescue Oliver, who is decapitated by the creature, but Perkins blows up Fennel's head with his pistol.

Soon afterwards, Sladen runs into an infected Hofner. She escapes the ship, and in her haste, only puts on her helmet after exiting. Perkins spots her outside and opens the airlock. Now unconscious, Sladen is carried in by Hofner to lure the others. They fight, and Davison manages to defeat Hofner by ripping off his parasite. The three survivors formulate a plan to electrocute the creature with the ship's fusion modules, which can only be accessed by going through the engineering quarters.

Alarms suddenly sound as a creature makes its way through the ship, committing sabotage. Sladen and Davison go through engineering to construct an electrocution trap, while Perkins goes to the computer room to monitor the creature. Sladen finishes rigging the trap just in time for the creature's arrival, and they apparently electrocute it to death. However, when Davison leaves, it captures Sladen.



Davison and Perkins follow her screaming and find her locked inside engineering. Studying the ship's blueprints, they find another entrance to engineering and sends Perkins to lure away the creature while Davison retrieves Sladen. On the way, Perkins locates one of the bombs Hofner had mentioned, just before the creature jumps him. Dying, Perkins manages to attach the bomb to the creature and set off the countdown so Davison can jettison it through the airlock.



It climbs back aboard, however, so Davison tackles it, throwing himself out the airlock in the process.



When the bomb fails to explode, Bryce appears and shoots it, which sets it off and kills the creature. She recovers Davison and reunites with Sladen, who dresses Davison's wounds. Finally, the trio leaves Titan aboard the West German ship.

A review---

https://thedigitalbits.com/item/creature-vinsyn-2021-brd

By
Stephen Bjork

"Creature was the second theatrical feature from writer/director William Malone, one of many low-budget sci-fi/horror films that followed in the wake of the success of Ridley Scott’s Alien in 1979.

Creature may appear to acknowledge its predecessor right in the title, but that was a last-minute change at the behest of the producers, as Malone always preferred his original title: Titan Find. Still, while Malone’s first treatment predated Alien, the narrative in the shooting script that he co-wrote with Alan Reed follows many of the familiar beats from Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett’s story: the crew of a spaceship lands on a planet where there’s already another ship which has encountered an alien species, and they are slowly picked off one-by-one as they try to figure out how to kill it.



That kind of story was hardly original to Alien, of course, but Scott’s film still provided the most recent antecedent, and clearly the producers were capitalizing on the sci-fi/horror resurgence that followed in its wake. On the other hand, Creature also freely borrows from other classic science fiction films like Planet of the Vampires, and even cheekily acknowledges its influences when crew members discuss the ending of The Thing from Another World before trying the same strategy to stop their own alien invader. Malone actually beat O’Bannon to the punch in that regard when O’Bannon did something similar in The Return of the Living Dead a few months later.

Despite having little money to work with, Malone actually managed to make Creature look better than the budget would imply. The sets are simple but effective, and there’s a surprising quantity of them in the film. The visual effects from the L.A. Effects Group are frequently quite good, which isn’t surprising considering that Bob and Dennis Skotak worked on them (prior to starting their own company with 4-Ward Productions).

Malone wisely borrowed from Ridley Scott’s playbook by keeping his own beast under wraps until later in the film, and while no one will ever confuse it with the work done by H.R. Giger and Carlo Rambaldi, it’s adequate. The same thing can be said about the acting, with only Klaus Kinski standing out, because he’s basically playing Klaus Kinski."

From me:

There are many Interesting features in the alien lab scenes. As the astronauts enter one of them turns the locking mechanism from FORBIDDEN PLANETs' Krell lab. Some other props from the movie are there as well.
As noted in Steves' review above one of the astronauts comments that she had seen an "old movie" about some men trapped in the arctic killed an alien "carrot" by electrocuting it. Obviously a shout out to THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD.
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There comes a time, thief, when gold loses its lustre, and the gems cease to sparkle, and the throne room becomes a prison; and all that is left is a father's love for his child.

[Gord Green]