The year is 20XX. The US is battling for space dominance by the one country you could be sure would still exist in the future when this film was made: West Germany. Some researcher on Saturn’s moon Titan find a big pill with an alien inside it and are totally nonplussed about it, so I guess that happens a lot. The alien creature proves to be hostile.
The beginning is very reminiscent of Return of the Living Dead, which also begins with two, well, morons working in isolation and finding something queer and taking all the wrong steps. That would make one think that like that classic zombie saga, Creature (or “The Titan Find”) is a comedy.
It is not.
It’s an alien clone about a crew that is sent to Titan to document the creature. They are just average joe’s like in Alien except for the security office who is either a android or one of the aliens from the 1980s mini-series V. It follows the aesthetic of Alien and general vibe, except it has sex scenes end general female nudity, which was the style at the time, and a lot more dead West Germans.
It also has a good dash of The Thing scattered throughout.
The effects aren’t too bad. The space scenes look quite good, although they have issues with superimposing objects without a big black border. The practical models, both miniature and full sized, and the Titan’s landscape sets are actually top notch. It looks a lot more expensive than I think it was. Of course, the sets look a lot like the ones from Alien so, you know. I also think the use the “bad spacey electric weather” sound effects from Aliens.
The acting is as expected. Ferris Bueller’s dad is no Tom Skerrit and, oh snap, it’s Klaus Kinski. He is a German scientist who survived the creature and meets up with the crew when it lands. It killed all his men by a creature that has waited for 2000 centuries, which is a weird way to say two hundred thousand years.
Director William Malone also directed the Geoffrey Rush remake of House on Haunted Hill, which I liked, and Feardotcom, which nobody liked. He didn’t really leave an impression here, but the film is fine. It does get a bit slow at times, but random gore makes up for it.
