“We found… a child’s butterfly collection. But some of these butterflies were not too friendly…”
I remember watching this film as a teen and enjoying it, even though it was pretty low budget. I think it’s honestly been decades since I saw it last, so all I could remember about it was a big window, a cheesy alien, a woman who took off her space suit ON THE SURFACE OF TITAN and Klaus Kinsky. I happened to run across a used copy at Bullmoose recently and picked it up based on nothing more than those vague memories.
I like space-based sci-fi horror films and I don’t think there’s enough of them. 1985 could probably have used more Alien ripoffs and fewer slasher flicks. While we got plenty of sci-fi adjacent horror in the 80s – from Critters to Videodrome – I can only think of a few that had space and/or aliens as a featured element. Films like Forbidden World, Lifeforce, Deep Space, and Galaxy of Terror. If you stretched things you could add films like The Blob or Killer Klowns From Outer Space, but they don’t scratch that same itch. Give me stuff like Event Horizon or Alien and I’m happy.
Not that Creature is at that level of quality. Even Galaxy of Terror looks like it has a higher budget. Still, I was in the mood for exactly this sort of film last night, so I popped it in.
The Medium
The used copy I picked up turns out to be the 2021 release from Vinegar Syndrome. This version looks pretty damn good, even with the cheap sets, costumes and… uh, everything. I probably saw this most recently on VHS, so it has to be better. This release also includes the “Director’s Cut,” with the original title of Titan Find, and that contains about six minutes of extra footage. Vinegar Syndrome didn’t spend much time restoring the longer version, so I stuck with the theatrical release.
For streaming options – well, apparently Creature is in the public domain due to a failure to register it, so you can find low-quality versions of it just about anywhere. That being written, it’s available for subs on Fandor, Screambox and FlixFling, and you can see it for free with ads on Roku and FreeVee. It can be purchased on FlixFling Amazon and AppleTV.
The Movie
The opening narration and text block of Creature lets us know that, in the future, two rival corporations dominate space exploration – Richter Dynamics and NTI. A cultural artifact of the time is that Richter Dynamics is specifically called out as a West German company. Not really forward thinking, as Germany was re-unified only five years after the release of this film. (To be fair, it certainly didn’t seem likely at the time.) Then we get a scene of a two-man archeological team investigating alien ruins on Titan. They find a bunch of large specimen tubes and one is damaged, releasing… something, which immediately attacks one of the men. Later, a ship piloted by the survivor (if survivor he is – he don’t look so good in the brief glimpse we get of him via video transmission) crashes his ship into an NTI space station.
I thought the space station – called Concord – was destroyed in the collision, but they talk about contacting it later in the movie, so maybe it was just a very bright explosion.
Already we’re getting a good idea of what kind of film we’re going to get. The suits and set aren’t too bad – the helmets look a lot like those from 2001 A Space Odyssey, actually – but the acting is incredibly slow and wooden. The space station looks great from the outside and like an episode of Buck Rogers on the inside. We do get a gory spurt of blood on the inside of a guy’s helmet, though, so that’s promising.
Months later NTI has sent a mission to Titan to find out what happened, and they’ve put Ferris Beuller’s dad in charge. Actually, Lyman Ward wouldn’t play that character for another year, and here he’s the company rep, David Perkins, and he’s kind of a tool, in classic Alien fashion. Before long, he’s ordered captain Davison (Stan Ivar) to land on the surface without even doing a quick survey, which leads inevitably to the ship – the Shenandoah – crashing through the unstable surface. The crew is forced to go look for help at a nearby Richter Dynamics ship, despite Perkins’ protests.
The film couldn’t afford to rent a traditional soundstage, so most of the film was shot in an abandoned industrial plant. It’s good production value for the most part, but the rooms of each spaceship have a similar quality to them that sometimes makes it difficult to tell where the characters are. We also don’t get many establishing shots, so there’s nothing but fog and rocky pillars to define the surface of Titan.
I can see I’m going to tend to write up the things that bothered me about the film, so let me just say that I did very much enjoy the film. It’s cheesy and low budget and the acting is mostly just serviceable, but it’s got a certain charm and character to it. They’re not making fun of themselves and they’re doing the best they can with the resources they have. Some things are surprisingly effective, and the director and screenwriter – William Malone (who also directed the 1999 remake of House on Haunted Hill) – knows to keep his alien monster mostly in the shadows. I also love the references to other classic sci-fi films, such as when a character mentions The Thing From Another World while brainstorming how to kill the monster. There’s also a security consultant, Bryce (Diane Salinger), who is a badass – not a common role for a woman in a sci-fi picture at the time.
It ain’t great, but it’s fun, and that’s all I can ask for from a movie like this.
There are a lot of things that bug me about the film. The scientific research is non-existent, so people will be able to survive without suits for minutes on the surface of Titan. Any tech speak is purely gobbledygook, and there’s unfortunately a lot of it. The crew does things like sending everyone except the engineer (an early appearance by Wendy Schaal) to the German ship, only to leave most of them milling about outside. The Shenandoah is apparently damaged enough that a surviving German scientist, Hofner (Klaus Kinsky), can just wander in off the surface of the planet without setting off alarms.
Honestly, most of this is to be expected. It’s a cheaply made monster flick, after all. You know what bothered me the most, though? Spiderwebs. Everywhere. On every available surface. On the surface of Titan. In the lab on the German ship. Pretty much anyplace that wasn’t the bridge of the Shenandoah. Spiders that can infest and cover the surface of a methane-atmosphere moon? And get into and cover the inside of an intact ship? THAT’S a monster I’d be frightened of. Instead, it just seems to be a shorthand for “this is spooky, isn’t it?” And it bugs me. I know I should let it go, but I can’t.
ANYWAY.
The crew finds a monster in the German ship and it kills the crew member who had a premonition she was going to die (Marie Lauren), but who gladly went into the spooky, empty ship anyway. Then Klaus Kinsky shows up, and he’s crazy. (Apparently crazy enough in person that a ton of his performance was unusable, because he’d just emote and talk to walls, or purposefully stand in poorly lighted sections of the set to do his scenes.) He informs the NTI crew that his expedition had uncovered the creature in an ancient lab or zoo of some sort, and that it’s killed everyone else. He’s sketchy and skeevy as hell, but it’s Klaus Kinsky, so he’s easily the best and most magnetic actor in the film. Nothing he says makes sense, but nobody else makes sense either. They’re just not as obviously crazy.
For budgetary reasons the alien turns out to have a parasite that allows it to take over dead bodies, meaning the producers could reuse “dead” characters as the bad guys without showing the very stiff-moving alien suit. This actually turns out to be a good thing for the film, as we’re aware of which characters are compromised, even if the other characters aren’t. This provides most of the suspense for the latter third of the film. (It also leads to that scene with the poor woman stripping on the surface of Titan that I mentioned earlier.)
Eventually the survivors will have to flee to the German ship, face the alien creature and hope to survive long enough to escape Titan.
The Bottom Line
Creature is not quite as good as I remembered, but that’s always a danger when it’s been decades since you last saw a film. It’s still a fun, cheesy sci-fi adventure that manages to entertain, almost despite itself. There’s not enough Klaus Kinsky and yet more than enough of him at the same time. If you keep your expectations low and treat it as a cheap thrill ride, I think you’ll have a good time. I sure did.
