CREATURE (1985)

CREATURE (1985)

Tagline: It's been sleeping peacefully on a moon of Saturn for 2000 centuries ... until now!

(Horror, Sci-Fi, Terror On Titan) [R]

Bryce, you can’t take these. These are prescription drugs…

In this one, a German geological research team from NTI finds something mysterious on Titan and only 1 person survives to tell the tale. A new team is sent out to find out what happened. Little do they know, something is out there. That’s it. That is all that is going on in this thing. It’s pretty simple. 

First off, yes, this is another sci-fi alien movie that borrowed from 1979’s ALIEN. One other thing aside from being a rip-off of ALIEN is that ALIENS (the second installment in the ALIEN series) actually ripped off the effects crew from this movie. So basically CREATURE is what the effects crew of ALIENS could do when they had a smaller budget to work with. 

Oddly – this movie fell into public domain and that is why it seems like everyone and their brother has this movie on their streaming platform. The movie also has numerous VHS and DVD releases. In 1985 this movie was nominated by the 12th Saturn Awards for best effects but lost to GREMLINS, which is a little bit odd because GREMLINS came out in 1984. 

Acting wise there are actually some known talents in this one and as a result, acting isn’t a problem. Everyone does a pretty solid job. A lot of 80s fans are going to recognize Lyman Ward who plays David Perkins. Lyman was also Ferris Bueller’s father in FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF. This one also stars Stan Ivar who plays Mike Davidson and was famous for a couple of stints on soap operas, but was also in the TV show “Star Trek: Voyager”. The movie’s lead female is Wendy Schaal who is still doing voice work. She was also in both THE ‘BURBS and INNERSPACE. 

What doesn’t work for this movie is a lot of the shots that are going on in the dark. Sometimes the lighting is fine and other times the lighting is terrible. I do wish there was a little more character development. We learn very little about these people making it harder to care if they get their brains taken over or not. Some critics did a lot of barking about people going into different places on the ship alone, but to be honest, this is a horror movie thing. If everyone went everywhere in a giant group and all fought together it would be a war movie. This doesn’t mean that a few of these characters would not have benefitted heavily from carrying a flashlight and some sort of space weapon.

Where this movie succeeds is in the set design, the space suits are actually pretty cool. The ship designs are unique and the effects are actually pretty solid for a movie that a lot of people don’t even know exists. A lot of space horror movies are almost too goofy to be scary. This one is not. It does a good job of conveying terrifying imagery and creating an atmosphere of overall dread and hopelessness. 

For me, CREATURE falls into the GALAXY OF TERROR arena. The gore and serious tone are a bit too much for this to be any actual fun even with the bits of campiness we get. Like a line where Beth says that a group of people was stranded on an ice station by a carrot from another planet. It’s a reference to THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, but it’s the only humor in the entire movie. For those reasons this one also gets a 4 out of 7. It’s definitely only a 1-time watch you might want to save for a space horror flick marathon.

GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF TRANS WORLD ENTERTAINMENT AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY. 

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