Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
And this is Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House, we're going to be talking about the nineteen eighty five sci fi thriller Creature, widely regarded as one of the many copycats of nineteen seventy nine's Alien, though I want to say, to be fair to Creature, it actually copies a number of different movies.
Yeah, you know, and he gets into you also end up getting into that area where it's like, all right, it was inspired by some of the films that inspired Alien, so you know, some of it kind of evens out in the wash, but it is. So I've been getting into Alien content a lot recently. I've been rewatching the original films. I'm gonna be running the Alien RPG aim from Free League here with some friends, and also we have a new Alien picture coming up in a couple
of months, Alien Romulus. So you know, I'm geeking out for all of these things. So in addition to rewatching the original films, I've also been digging in a bit into some of these Alien knockoffs and Alien inspired films, some of which I've never seen before, some of which I have been avoiding, some of which I'll probably can continue to avoid. But this one is often held up as being one of the more entertaining ones.
You know. I was having a thought about that Alien RPG, which looks very fun and I would like to play it, But I was thinking about how it shows the way that character cliches turn into character types, so that like things that are established in these movies as like, oh, here's just a type of character you see in Alien or Aliens, and then a lot of its copycats that
apparently in this game becomes a class. Like you would have classes of characters in D and D, and you've got wizards and rogues and you know, and warlocks and all that, and apparently in this Alien game you've got company men. I think you can be like a Burke, You've got space marines, you can be a Vasquez. You've got like all those types of characters are classes, right, Yeah.
Like you can be a marine, you can be you can be a Marshall company agent.
You can be a kid.
Of course kids have special rules and so forth. Yeah, so I'm really excited to play it. I think it does a pretty phenomenal job of taking the Alien films like accepting everything and then managing to do a lot of great world building out of it. So solid recommendation thus far from me. But I'm not actually playing it for the first time until tonight.
I would want to play as a slimy whyland UTAWNI suit that my class.
Yeah, it's pretty great. There's one of those in the scenario that I'm running tonight.
Oh but wait, sorry, because you were in the middle of talking about how I know you haven't just been on a kick of strictly alien and Alien franchise stuff, but everything in that zone of storytelling and media, right, Like you've been going back to the the pre alien stuff.
Yeah, I mean like one of the classics, of course is Mario Bob has Planet to the Vampires, which we've previously discussed on Weird House. Another one that I recently watched, probably for the first time in full, was John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon Dark Star, which, on one hand, you
have the Dan O'Bannon connection there. He's one of the screenwriters and one of the very instrumental in Alien obviously, but also Dark Star has this blue collar like space trucker feel to it, you know, something that is very much an essential part of the DNA of Alien, you know, because if you take out the creature and the setting is still a vital aspect of that picture.
I've said this on the show before, but I have a theory that Alien is one of the best movies ever made about work, and that's kind of what makes it unique and interesting and realistic. The characters in Alien are not friends. They know each other reasonably well, not super well. They're not close, and the kind of relationship they have is the kind of relationship people often have
with like co workers. It's like, you know, you got to get along to get the work done, but you don't even you know, you might or might not like each other, You might or not, you know, have all these conflicts. So it's not just a movie that features blue collar workers, but is itself about work?
Yeah, yeah, I think that's a solid point. There are some other films that are often thrown out as being like predecessors to Alien, nineteen fifty eight's hit The Tear from Beyond Space, which I haven't seen. I was looking at it the other day but that's one that the director of this picture points out as being one of
his inspirations. I think there's some obvious inspiration here from Planet of the Vampires, but again, I think Creature is ultimately one of the more entertaining and also, as I'll discuss tasteful alien knockoffs that has come out.
Yeah, I know what you're saying. Some of the Alien knockoffs from the eighties, which I have seen and have enjoyable parts, some of them just get kind of gross with like the you know, the weird sort of implied sexuality of Alien is realized in a nastier way in a lot of these copycats.
Yeah, because, I mean, you can't take topics and ideas of sexuality and reproduction out of Alien. It's very much part of the DNA, It's very much a part of hr Giger's visual surrealism that informs so many aspects of
the film. But yeah, you'll look at various Alien knockoffs like the Corman produced Galaxy of Terror and the British and Seminoid, both from nineteen eighty one, and these are both examples of film that they end up just coming off sleazy and exploitive in my opinion, because they don't deal with these things with the nuance and that kind of almost subliminal energy that Alien does so well. Now, another thing to keep in mind about Creature here is that, Okay,
Alien was of course a world class production. I think I had a budget of eleven million dollars. This is late seventies money. It had helming it one of the most visually visionary directors you know of our time, and on top of that, you know the work of hr
Giger and so forth. Creature, however, was made for less than half of this amount of reported four point two million dollars, and it's a pretty ambitious project for what was reportedly even half that in budget at the outset, because you end up having multiple sci fi sets, like, you know, over a dozen different sets, including spaceship interiors, alien planets. You've got spaceship models, planetary surface models, various
special effects, and ultimately a respectable cast. You know, this is not one of those casts where everybody's green and acting like they just though out of the back of a truck or something. It's ultimately, I think pretty commendable what they're able to do. When you remind yourself that this was low budget that was shot in a warehouse during like a super hot summer where they're just totally unable to cool things down enough and having to deal
with everyone's sweating in their big spacesuits. You know, I think it comes together pretty well when you take all that into account.
Oh, I wonder if they sort of improvised a way of writing that into the script, because there's a whole subplot in the middle of the movie where a couple of characters are able to figure out that another character is brain slugged and tricking them because they're sweating in this hot ship and he's not.
Yeah, yeah, that's so, because yeah, there are all these behind the scenes tidbits about just how hot it was and it was. There were sweating and it was like steaming up the insides of the helmets. So yeah, it sounds like it was a grueling, but most of the accounts seem to say it was.
You know, it's a pretty.
Pretty fun shoot for the most part, with some some key caveats that we'll come back to. All Right, Joe, what's your elevator pitch for creature?
Oh, let's see how to create the perfect organism. Get a little bit of your Alien, a little bit of your the thing, and a little bit of your the brain eaters, and put them all into blender and here's what you got.
I want to say that there's a little bit of dinosaur costume to this guy as well, especially if you're in the in the film when you see him more of a full body shot, there's kind of like a big rubber dinosaur costume sense to him. Yeah. Again, it's an unenviable task to try to create something that is alien esque but on a budget without a you know, visionary artist behind its design.
Now, I think it would be impossible to deny that this movie is derivative of Alien in many ways. But one thing I think is kind of surprising about it is that it also feels derivative of Aliens, and yet it's not because this came before Aliens. So there are several things in it where I was like, oh, this is this is taking this thing from you know, the camera in movie, but actually it wasn't out yet, so this came first.
Yeah. There's also stuff in here that reminds me a little bit of things we would later see in Prometheus, with Prometheus reaching back and drawing from things like Planet of the Vampires. But like we have this scene with like the Black Ooze we'll talk about and yeah, and like the space zombies are abominations, so so yeah, it's a really fun one I think to watch as an alien fan. And again, it avoids, I think, most of the pitfalls of lewdness that you encounter with some of
these other alien knockoffs. All right, let's go ahead and listen to that trailer audio.
In the near future, in the shadow of Saturn's rings, stranded beneath the surface of the barren moon called Titan, scientists find the one thing they never expected.
Is anybody here was expecting them.
And suddenly those who had traveled across the galaxy had one out of space. Creature. It kills to live, and it lives to kill.
All right. So at this point, if you were thinking to yourself, well, I would like to see Creature, I haven't seen it, or I would like to see it again before continuing on with this episode, well, luckily, Creature has been available in various home video formats for quite a while, but in my opinion, the twenty twenty two release from Vinegar Syndrome the Blu Ray is definitely the way to go for physical media on this one. I rented it from Atlanta's Videodrome. It's got some cool extra features.
It has the original Titan Find cut of the film, which is a bit darker compared to the main theatrical cut that you have on the disc, but still interesting to check out. You can also stream Creature digitally on multiple platforms, and there are multiple digital rental and purchase options as well.
I'm in a weird situation that I watched the first half of the movie as the Titan Find cut and the second half in the theatrical cut, so I don't know what the difference is.
Did you did you notice any changes in lighting, because I really didn't look at the Titan Find one much, so I can't speak to it.
You mean, not darker in terms of tone, but darker visually, Yes, the Titan Find cut is very dark. In fact, we were talking off Mike about how one of my main complaints about the movie is that you can't see the sets at all. The characters are just standing around in darkness talking, so I can't even tell if the sets are good or not. In the theatrical cut. Yeah, it
was a little. It did seem a little bit more illuminated, a little bit brighter, but still you couldn't see a lot of the sets on the planet.
Now, speaking of physical media, I want to give a shout out to Future Shock Video in New Orleans. This is a new video rental store that we just read about in New Orleans Magazine. It's operated by Eden Chubb, who was apparently partially inspired by Weird House Cinema and certainly inspired by Atlanta's own video rental store, Videodrome. The name of the store is also a nod to the concept of future Shock, which we've discussed on the show.
So kudos to Eden for keeping the physical media circulating. You can learn more about Future Shock Video at Futureshockvideo dot diz, and you can follow the store on Instagram at future Shock Video. All right, Well, let's get into the people who made this film, all right. Starting at
the top, director, writer, producer. It's William Malone born nineteen fifty three, UCLA Film School grad, writer and director who started out in acting and some special effects work, but then, in the wake of nineteen seventy nine's Alien, which he was inspired by, he was able to raise a reported seventy four thousand dollars to make the film Scared to Death, in which a Giger esque creature runs amok in the
La sewer system. I haven't seen this one, so I can't really to it, but I looked at a couple of stills in the Monster Man.
This must have been a really precious project to him, because he works. I don't know if you caught onto this, Rob how many references too Scared to Death? He works into creature? Did you notice these?
I didn't notice them so much, but you were pointing out some of them, and I guess you'll point them out as we go here. Yeah, maybe they're supposed to be the same cinematic universe.
Oh, I didn't consider that. Well, but I don't know if that would work because one character is reading the novelization of Scared to Death.
All right, So this film Creature, which was originally he talks about this on the extras. It was originally in. It originally had the working title Titan Fined, which the producers did not like the other like the main money behind it. They were like, it sounds too much like tight and fine. People are going to think it's something else, which seems like it's a little reaching there. I don't know, I didn't think about that connotation. I think Titan Fine sounds rather fascinating and very sci fi.
It makes me think maybe they were thinking sounds too intellectual and they were coming up with an excuse for why they wanted to just call it monster.
But anyway, this was the follow up. He mentions in some of those extras that he was always terrible at writing to meet a particular budget, and that was very
much the case here. It was apparently a real struggle to go after everything they needed to make Creature, and at one point in the production, one of the producers I think this is Mush Diamond Diamant, It could be wrong, but he comes in and says, oh, you guys need more money for what you're trying to do here, and essentially double their budget at that point, which Malone says was of course it was a lifeline, but also it was a bit frustrating at that stage in the production
because they were already a certain way into making everything based on what you had, and suddenly you have additional resources, which and you can't really redo what you've done already. You have to think of other other ways to make use of those funds.
I feel like we have talked about more examples of it going the other way, where you start making a movie and then the budget gets cut.
Yeah.
So, I mean one of the things they ended up doing when more money came in on this one is hired klas Kinsky, which we'll get into, which I don't think is always I would go so far as to say, is maybe never a good use of extra money in your film, to say, well, let's bring in noted nightmare Kloskinski. That's gonna be great for the film and great for morale.
Oh, we just got a bunch of extra money. We can use that to rent a jar of red back spiders and release them onto the set.
Essentially.
Yeah, it really spiced things up.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's gonna make people more excited in front of the camera.
Let's do it.
Well, more on that in a bit, But both Scared to Death and Creature we're apparently successful. Creature was a theatrical release, and Malone followed the film up with some TV projects. He directed three episodes of Freddy's Nightmares, and he also directed two episodes of Tales from the Crypt,
one of which he also wrote. He also did one episode of the short lived sci fi spinoff of Tales from the Crypt Perversions of Science, and after some additional TV projects, he directed the big budget remake of House on Haunted Hill in nineteen ninety nine.
I know you remember this one, Joe. I mean, I don't think there's any way to make the case that it's good, but it's very watchably bad. It has a great cast, kind of star studded, you know, a lot of great character actors running around doing ridiculous things. I remember it being really ugly, like a movie that's quite hard on the eyes, but it's I had a great time.
Yeah, I remember Jeffrey Combs has a fun, i think, non speaking role in it, and then Jeffrey Rush basically plays Vincent Price in the film, like in fact, the character's name is Stephen Price, and that is as fun as it sounds, you know, just letting Rush go wild for the duration of the film as Vincent Price.
Just trying to remember who else is in it. I looked at up. It's got Tay Diggs, Chris Catan, fam Ki Janssen.
It's oh Man. When Tay Diggs was in a lot of different movies. Yeah, yeah, yeah, anyway back to Malone. His only two films after that were two thousand and two is Fear dot Com, which I remember is being quite awful, speaking of.
Ugly movies that are hard on the eyes, that we're right in that zone around the turn of the millennium where movies it seems we're just the color palette and the and the brightness level and everything was optimized to hurt the eyes to watch.
Yeah, Like I mean, I don't even want to throw too much shade at Malone for Fear dot Com because Fear dot Com was exactly the sort of movie that the year two thousand and two wanted. And even though I do not like it, there are a number There aren't a lot of films from two thousand and two. I'm exactly going going back and feeling nostalgic for He did one more film in two thousand and eight, and he also directed one episode of two thousand and six's
Masters of Horror, The Fair Haired Child. As a writer, he also worked on nineteen ninety nine Universal Soldier, The Return, and the Year two thousand movies Supernova. Now there's another writer that is credited one Alan Reid. But I couldn't find much about them. This is not to be confused with the original voice of Fred Flintstone, different Alan Reid. But I could not figure out exactly who this individual is.
Sorry, this is a completely out of order, but I just remembered another actor in his house on Haunted Hill, and that there's a cameo where Lisa Loebe plays a TV reporter. What yeah, why, I don't know.
I'm good for her, all right, Moving on to the actors in this film. This is of course an alien esque picture. So we have a crew, and if you have a crew, you got to have a captain. And our captain is Captain Mike Davison played by Ivar born nineteen forty three. Not only is he our captain in this film, he's he was. Also he's also a future actual ship captain according to Malone. So he chalks that up to good casting, like he saw this guy and realized this, this dude can command a ship.
I mean, he is believable as a ship captain. I will say that no offense to Stan. I don't have a lot to say about his performance here. It's sort of a like a It's like a slice of white toast with no butter or Jam's there's nothing wrong with it, nothing to offend, but also it's very plain.
Yeah, and it's fitting that at this point in his career, mostly a TV actor, he had just played John Carter on Little House on the Prairie, along with some other various guest show spots, guest spots on shows. But you know, he is the kind of actor he can easily imagine doing a lot of scenes where he's just coming back from some farm work and he needs a nice drink
of water back at the Little on the Prairie. Anyway, this sort of work would would continue with him doing a lot of one shots on popular TV series of the eighties and nineties. His latter film credits include roles in nineteen ninety one's Harley Davidson and the Marlborough Man and nineteen ninety three's Aspen Extreme. His last credits were a pair of NCIS episodes in twenty ten. But yeah, he's he's solid in this, you know, like you said,
he does a solid job. No notes really, but you know, he's no Tom Scarett, but he is maybe Tom Scarett esque.
I think they were clearly going for a Tom Scarett type. They wanted to replicate Dallas as a relatively soft spoken, stoic, strong masculine captain, and he sort of gets there, but he doesn't really have Tom Skarett's quiet charisma.
Yeah, all right. Now, he does have a girlfriend on the crew though. You know. That's of course, one of the very notable things about Alien is there are no romantic entanglements. Yeah, but that's not the here because his girlfriend is also a crew member. And this is the character Beth Slaton played by Wendy Shaw.
You know, Shaul is an interesting presence in this film. I think she is just very likable and very grounded. She feels like a real person. For the most part. Her portrayal of this character is strong in its understatedness, you know, like she she plays the character as kind of quiet and not super expressive, but that works well. But she does have a couple of unintentionally funny moments.
For example, do you remember the part where she's telling the story of Hofner the of you know, Klauskinsky trying to kill her and in the scene, I could just imagine the director behind the camera gesturing at her to display more emotion, you know, like come on, make it bigger, bigger, And so she does, and it comes off very forced in a funny way. Also, at least at least three or four times, maybe more in the movie, she says another character's name wrong. She says Davidson instead of Davison,
which you might think is simply realistic. Oh maybe people, you know, people get people's names wrong, Except Davison is supposed to be her boyfriend, and she's calling him by his last name.
Maybe that's his middle name. We don't know his full name.
He you know, maybe, oh, maybe that's her like cutesy nickname for him. Yeah, it's an inside joke, but on the whole, as I was saying, Shaul is quite good in this character and very likable. She brings a kind of human energy to the to the character, and I think without her we would not have a lot of reason to care about the humans.
I agree, especially when you whittle it down to what we're left with towards the end of the picture, because that's always telling which characters have you chosen to sacrifice, in which characters are going to land a plane or a spaceship in this case. Yeah, so Shall born nineteen fifty four was a pretty seasoned TV actor by this point. I think it shows, having popped up on various late
seventies and early eighties network series. She'd continue to work in TV, and her latter film credits include Film and TV credits include the likes of nineteen eighty seven's The Munchies. This is a Gromlins movie that I haven't seen, but we're not going to stop there. It gets better, nineteen eighty seven's Inner Space Batteries not included from the same year, nineteen eighty nine's The Birds, and such TV series as The X Files, Six Feet Under and Star Trek Voyager.
She's also done a lot of voice acting for The Family Guy and American Dad animated series.
I just had to check to make sure, but yes, Munchies is the Roger Corman produced, a Grimlins rip off.
Yeah, it does not look good. I haven't seen it. It may be great.
I don't know. I haven't seen it now. I mentioned earlier that there were some elements of this movie that I first mistakenly thought were lifted out of Aliens, and then realized, oh no, this movie came out before Aliens, and one of them is the next character we're about to talk about. Played by Lymon Ward. This is the Burke character, except he comes before Burke.
That's right. Yeah, lyman Ward plays David Perkins. Ward was born nineteen forty one Canadian actor, character actor, most famous for playing Ferris Buehler's dad in nineteen eighty six, but you also might recognize him from other things. He pops up in the likes of Independence Day in ninety six. He's in a nine Grand m Street Part two. He's done a lot of TV and film work over the decades, going back to seventy one, and he's apparently still active.
His other credits include seventy three's Coffee, eighty four's Moscow on the Hudson, eighty seven's Planes, Trains and Automobiles, and nineteen ninety two Sleepwalkers.
Yeah. So, I think lyman Ward brings a kind of and I don't necessarily mean this in a bad way. I kind of welcome cheesiness that is in some ways inseparable from his recognizability as a minor eighties character actor. I would put him almost in the clue Gulager zone, if you know what I'm saying.
Yeah, I think that's fair.
Yeah, and it makes it more surprising and enjoyable. In fact, when he starts like making brain slug zombie heads explode.
That's a great scene. I can't wait to talk about that one. Also of note, he's interviewed in some of the extras on the Vinegar Syndrome disc and he's one of these individuals who says that he got along fine with Kinsky on the set and went out to lunch with him a couple of times. And I don't mention that as in any way an attempt to redeem Kinsky, who, as we'll discuss, I think most agree, was an out
of control monster. But it is interesting how seemingly there were folks that he worked with who didn't have absolute nightmares around him, And I wonder how much of that had to do with, like, to what degree Kinsky felt
threatened by someone? Seems like the kind of guy who's going to be very threatened by anybody that is in a position of power over him, like a director or a producer, or or seemingly you know, female members of a cast, but here is just a male co star, perhaps one of the Perhaps this is one of those moments where you actually end up getting something a little more balanced out of Kinski because he's not threatened by you his.
You know, his.
Narcissistic view of himself. It does not feel in danger around this person.
I don't know.
Anyway, food for thought. Moving on, we also have Robert Jeffey playing John Finnel born nineteen forty nine, handsome young actor coming off of small roles in nineteen seventy two, including The Mechanic, but by this point he'd largely moved
more into the production and writing side of things. He was one of the screenwriters on nineteen seventy seven's Demon Seed, the out of control AI movie based on the novel by Dean Kotz, and he was also a screenwriter on nineteen eighty's Motel Hell, which he also produced and notable to the subgenre of space horror. At some point, it looks like Jeffy acquired the rights to George R. R. Martin's
novella Nightflyers. He produced and wrote an adaptation of that in nineteen eighty seven, though I believe it's based more on Martin's original short story version of that tale, and he was again listed as a producer on the twenty seventeen TV mini series adaptation I've only seen parts of the eighty seven adaptation and it looks really goofy and fun.
I've seen the entirety of the twenty seventeen mini series, which has a great cast, looks phenomenal, but honestly kind of bored me to death after a while.
Well, I've never seen the eighty seven movie, but I've wanted to for a while so that we may come back to that on Weird House. But I will say, as far as just his acting performance here, along with Wendy Shall, I think Jaffee is the other most sympathetic and realistic performance among the crew. He brings a kind of relaxed humanity that makes it all the more alarming when he starts trying to brain leach people.
Yeah, it was kind of surprising that this is a guy who seemingly was, I'm assuming here making a lot of assumptions, but was drawn more towards the behind the scenes stuff as opposed to staying in front of the camera because he's great in front of the camera. Yeah, he is, all right. We also have a character by the name of Melanie Bryce who She is the security officer that's brought in on this, which is also kind of kind of something. I mean, this is obviously in Aliens.
Like the whole plot revolves around, well, this is a problem. Let's bring in some muscle. Let's bring in the Colonial Marines. That's kind of her purpose here. They're like, we think there's going to be something Xena Morriphy going on. We better bring in some tall, mysterious woman who doesn't talk
and has a big gun. Bryce here is played by Diane Salinger born nineteen fifty one, tall, striking American actor who prior to this had apparently done some stage work in New York and then moved out to la at the behest of her agent. But this wasn't her only nineteen eighty five film. She also appeared in Tim bur Pee Wee's Big Adventure, playing Simone, a waitress that dreams
of visiting France. After this, she'd remain friends with Paul Rubens, and Tim Burton directed her again as the Penguin's Mother, alongside Paul Rubens playing the Penguin's father in nineteen ninety two's Batman Returns. WHOA Yeah Yeah. She's done a lot of TV and film work over the years, including such titles as ninety one's The Butcher's Wife ninety five's The Scarlet Letter, two thousand and one's Ghost World. I believe
she plays a psychiatrist in that. She has a recurring role in HBO's Carnival, and she also did a couple of Star Trek Deep Space nine episodes.
I want to say that there are some very weird things about her characterization here, but I think that's not her fault. It's like the character is written very oddly, that there's a complete mismatch between the ways she's portrayed in different scenes, and then when you get to the later way she's portrayed, it doesn't make any sense why they had her portrayed a different way earlier on. But doing what she can with what she has to work with in the script, I think she's good.
Yeah, yeah, I mean added caveat. This was her first film. She has great energy and a unique look. I checked out some various behind the scenes interviews that she did about this in other films, and she's a real blast, like full of personality and insight. And we'll get back to some of that.
In a bit.
All Right, we have a let's see, we have a doctor on the crew. This is doctor Wendy h Oliver played by Annette McCarthy who lived nineteen fifty eight through twenty twenty three. Mostly a TV actor with credits that include Twin Peaks. She played Evelyn Marsh on that and she also appeared on Baywatch.
Yeah, her presence in the movie is more minor. There is one funny moment I don't know if it's supposed to be funny, where she's being lured off to a dark room by a brain slug possessed Robert Jaffey and she starts talking about how she's not a real doctor and he's like, oh, I have a secret too. Anyway, let's go into this room.
Yeah, that was interesting, and the character development went nowhere because she's killed the next scene, but it also was kind of a funny moment. And then we have the character Susan Delambrey played by Marie Lauren. Her birthdate's not public record, but she's in a number of the making of bits on the disc as well. Energetic American actor
with a really solid supporting role in this film. I think, you know, like she's a doomed character, but she gets to do more than just be doomed, if that makes sense. At this point in her career, she'd appeared in various TV series, and she went on to act in David Lynch's nineteen eighty eight short film The Cowboy and the Frenchman, and she's been active in recent years as a writer and producer on such films as twenty twenty three Is the Uncanny, in which she also stars.
Okay, she has a different energy than any other character in this movie in that she almost feels like out of a story involving magic. She has prophetic visions of the fact that she's going to die, which it doesn't really fit with the story. Otherwise there's no other inkling of like magic or psychic powers, and she just happens to know that they're doomed and she's going to die. And she also kind of wanders around with a dreamlike, almost fairy like kind of spirit.
Yeah. Yeah. According to the extras on the disk, she was the one who came to the director and said, all right, this pivotal scene where my character seemingly comes back from the dead and lures another character there death, I need to be nude for this. And he was like, okay, let's do it.
On the planet's surface. The surface of Titan.
Yeah, but I think the nudity does add to the creepiness of the sequence because it makes it even more of an obvious delusion, and ultimately I think one of the creepier sequences in the picture.
She has multiple of the creepiest moments in the movie. There's that. There's also a scene later on where she's in a space suit and the characters come across her and they think that she is dead, but she suddenly like grins and all this blood bursts out of her mouth as she sort of like pops awake and smiles. It's gross, all right.
And then of course we have Kloskinski playing the character Hans Rudy Hofner, which of course is an obvious nod to alien designer hr Gieger or Hans Rudy Gieger.
There's a lot I could say about this performance. I'll maybe save some of it for when we talk about the plot. But also this character feels completely superfluous to the story, like it's just sort of copy pasted in.
Yeah. Apparently it's very much the case that they got the extra money, they realized they could cast Kloskinski if they could get in touch with him. According to Malone, the only way to get in touch with Kinsky at the time was to send a telegram, and he was reportedly living in like a shack somewhere up in the California mountains, and he slept on straw on the floor, and they were somehow able to get in touch with
him and cast him here. But then, of course, as one would expect, especially at this point in his career, he was a nightmare. You know. The thing about Kinski is that he's famous. He's infamous for being not only this ball of crazed intensity that can be captivating on the screen, but also being almost impossible, if not just almost universally impossible to work with. Like there's so many accounts of him being either insanely difficult or being just
a loathsome human being, sometimes both, often both. You can get both from him, And so we've talked about him a little bit on Weird House Cinema before he was in the killer snake movie Venom in nineteen eighty one. I would guess he achieved his most notable work in the films of legendary director Werner Herzog, who seems to have been one of the very few directors like capable of managing him to some degree.
Yeah, by whatever means necessary. Yeah.
Now on this production, he notably harassed Diane Salinger on the set. Totally unacceptable. Would not fly it all today, obviously, But in interviews she has reflected on this, and she's talked about how she really had to check his bs and put him in his place at one point. So she's very tall, Kinsky was a short man. At one point, she says she had to like pick him up in a bear hug and just kind of like shake him and in doing so like largely put him in his place.
So I get that after a while she did not have to worry about Kinsky, but you know, he was awful on the set and she had to put him in his place. But she reflects on some of this in the twenty twenty one documentary Creation Is Violent, anecdotes on Kinsky's final years. She also talks a little bit on the vinegar syndrome disc She points out that Kinsky did some brilliant takes for Creature, but they couldn't use a lot of them because he just refused to hit
his mark, so he was often out of focus. You know, he was very much not going to listen to any director or cameraman or anything, and so they ended up losing a lot of footage. So what you see is, to a certain extent, what they could actually use, like is he in is he? Is?
He?
Is he blurry?
No?
Okay?
Is he eating a sandwich? Well? Yes, I guess we'll use it.
That would explain it. He is he eating a sandwich? And it almost sounds like he's making up his lines while he choose Yeah.
I mean, because I'm assuming he's probably gonna largely say whatever he wants either. So just an unenviable position to imagine anyone trying to direct this man and something. Even if you might get those moments of brilliance on camera where you know, you get that like that raw crackling kinsky intensity, but what what are you willing to sacrifice for yourself or for the cast in order to get there?
All right? The music on this one the scores by Thomas Chase and Steve Rucker, both born nineteen forty nine. These guys went on to work extensively on animated series including boy Dooo, Powerpuff Girls, and various other projects. Looks like maybe some various other Cartoon Network related projects.
I think the score here feels almost consciously like an attempt to reproduce the score of Alien. Yes, there are even similar dynamics, where like there's kind of a swelling of the orchestra, but then it dies away, and then there's a single high melody line that's carried by a woodwind like a clarinet or an obo, just like you get in some of the Alien music. It feels familiar.
Yeah. Now, as far as the effects go, the main team here was the La Effects Group INK, which among others, included Suzanne M. Benson, who would go on to work on Aliens the following year and win an Oscar for it. In fact, Benson was the first woman apparently to win an Oscar for special effects work. Michael McCracken is credited with the initial design of the Titan Find Creature our Monster in this He also worked on nineteen eighty nine's of Iathan.
Special effects in this movie are fun. They are. I would say they are mixed in terms of quality. You can tell there were some budget limitations at some points, but almost all of the effects shots are fun.
Yeah, yeah, obvious limitations, but yeah, there's a lot of fun stuff in here, and sometimes it's hilarious. You know, you know, great effects team is only going to go so far when you're up against those budgetary constraints and you're working in this super hot warehouse in the heat of the summer in California. All right, well, let's jump into the plot here. Let's let's go into space and see if anyone can hear a screen.
Okay, Well, the first thing we get is intense music, minor chords, pounding, hollow drums, kind of a sweeping Doppler sound of symbols once again, I will say, quite reminiscent of the Jerry go old Smith's score in Alien. And then we get some text telling us about the setting. So we are told in the competition for new materials and advanced to manufacturing techniques, two multinational corporations have invested
heavily in space. The rival firms of Richter Dynamics of West Germany and NTI of the USA are locked in a fierce race for commercial supremacy. So, first of all, we can note that space is being colonized for business purposes, but Germany is still divided here. And then also this will despite how much attention they give it by including a text legend right here at the top. This will play remarkably little role in the plot.
Yeah, yeah, it's some nice background color that does feel very much in keeping with the alien universe, you know, with the corporations like Whyland Utani. But yeah, it's not particularly necessary.
So next we get to Chiron saying that we are on Titan, which is Saturn's largest moon, on following a geological research team from NTI. And we're also told that it's April fifth, But is it April fifth on Earth or on Titan? So I don't know if there would be an April on Titan. Somewhere somewhere here on Titan.
There's an opening scene where there are a couple of guys in bulky Eva suits exploring an indoor space, so it seems to be the ruins of an ancient alien civilization, though unfortunately we don't see all that much of their architecture or really much texture in here at all. It's just a dark room with some hard to identify objects scattered around on the floor.
Yeah, and this is true of either cut of the film, even in the brighter theatrical cut. It's like, I don't know they're they're really impressed. But this is this is not the egg chamber from the alien space ship and alien this is something more achievable based on their budget.
Yeah, so the two geologists seem very excited about their find. This is a big discovery. It's some kind of ancient alien ruin. But I wasn't quite clear rob within the setting of this movie, do humans already know that aliens exist? Or is this the very first evidence of it.
I mean, they've given us nothing to indicate that aliens were known of before. They mentioned new materials, but they don't say whether those are organic materials or inorganic materials, so maybe it's all new or I mean maybe they were expecting it. So they're like, yes, of course alien life, we don't know.
So they perform some analysis to figure out that these structures are more than two hundred thousand years old. And on the floor of this room they find a number of large, damaged capsule shaped objects that have like viewing glass on the upper lids, and they look inside one of them and believe they see a skeleton of something amos, almost like these are some kind of sarcophag guy. And then they find one capsule that is actually still intact, and they look inside. They look through the glass and
they see the face of some kind of creature. So they start trying to move the capsule, and then one of the scientists says like, m you know, this has been here for a quarter of a million years. If we wake it up, it's likely to be very pissed and very hungry. What And then they move it anyway, and while they're examining the alien remains through the glass that the creature inside moves, and then they're like ah. But then they just kind of like, ah, there's probably nothing.
Let's forget all about it. And then one of the two guys sits on the capsule to pose for a photo with it.
Yeah. I love this bit because the other guy that's taking the photo is like, all right, move into the shot, and then he's telling him I need you to set on it for scale. Can you imagine if this had happened in Alien, if they were like, hey, Caine, go ahead and sit on one of those egg things because we need folks back home to know how big it is.
Yeah, put your face right by it, open your mouth. I need your mouth open for scale.
And so he sits on it, of course he's like, all right, all right, let's do this photo, and.
Then chocolate syrup starts leaking out of the container and we get an attack. There's there's actually a really good FOLI here. There's like a good squishing sound effect when the alien is popping out. Maybe this squishing something inside the guy's body. But they get attacked first the goo and then the creature.
Yeah. I like this. The goo's good. Again. This reminds me of the black goo that would pop up in the more recent alien films. And you know, it's a good Like in Spacesuit Death, we get they'll they'll return to this basic effect time and time again. But a quick splat of blood and the inside of the EVA helmet and you're good to go. I don't know how it got him. I guess it came up, like I guess through the butt that's he's setting on it.
After all, it's the it's the Ghoulies approach.
Yeah, the actual like biology of our creature here, there's a lot left to interpretation, but I agree that the foley work the sound effects quite nice. And credit on this apparently goes to Marvin Kerner.
Yeah. I liked a lot of the sound effects in the movie, though there are some that are a bit puzzling. Did you notice how whenever a door would open or close it played a Star Wars blaster sound effect.
I guess it did. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that, but but yeah, on the whole, I felt like the sound effects helped elevate things. I should also go ahead and point out we'll probably come back to this, but the spaceship scenes look really good. The model work, the lighting of the model, shooting the models, space sequences in general look great. So there's a lot in this film effects wise that was done really well considered, especially considering the budget, and serves to elevate the picture.
Now here's a random note about this opening scene. I believe one of the scientists in this scene is named Ted Laandergan, and because you see the last name Laudergan on the space and the other guy repeatedly refers to him as Ted. Now, that is not really notable, especially since this character just dies and doesn't come back, but it is notable within the meta context of the film, because apparently that is the name of the private detective
who takes it too personal. In William Malone's previous movie Scared to Death. So this is one of the many Scared to Death references within Creature that I brought up earlier.
Oh man, this one's just for the Scared to death heads. That's what we call themselves.
Anyway, After this, we get a title. The version I was watching for this part of the movie was called The Titan Find. An other cut is called Creature once Again. I think I said this earlier, but I watched half of the movie and the Titan Find cut half of the movie and the Creature cut. And I don't know what I missed one way or another.
I think I've read that it's mostly a little exposition, so and I don't know that a little makes a whole lot of difference.
All Right, after the titles, we are moving again. So next we're told it's June twenty I assume Earth calendar, and we're looking at the space station Concord, which is a wheel shaped sort of the Stanford Tourists space station. Uh, and we're told that it is owned by the NTI Corporation, that's the USA based one in orbit around the Earth's Moon. And we get one of you know, a classic radar room scene where there's somebody sitting in there, and they say, sir,
we've got we're picking up something on the on the computer. Oh, it's headed right for us. So the command center detects a spacecraft on a collision course. Then they say, we've got a visual here, and they tune all these TVs into I guess the like a stream from the cockpit of this space ship and they go, what the hell, and the pilot of the incoming ship is a fallout gool. Yeah.
Yeah, It's like it's like a space a zombie from Planet of the Vampires. It's like one of the abominations that you counter in Prometheus is that, like, well, I guess one of the guys from our opening scene is here, like just fully zombified and is driving straight towards the space station, no brakes or anything.
And then it hits and the space station explodes, which I wasn't quite expecting.
So I was not expecting it either, Like this feels like the worst case scenario. Like it's so bad that I assumed, Okay, we're going to get a one week earlier bit on this because this maybe this isn't the same guys from the beginning. Clearly somebody returning with an alien pathogen and destroying a massive space station. That's as bad as it gets, and we have to work backwards from this disaster.
But that's not the case, right, No, we're time to meet our crew, so we go to a different ship. We're cutting around a lot. Now we're on a mission to Titan. So NTI has sent a second ship called the Shinandoah to Titan with instructions to claim the artifacts discovered by the original team of scientists. So the artifacts it melted the last guys made them into space zombies. You need to go get that stuff now. And it
starts off when we meet everybody. They're gathered in a room that clearly looks like the interior styling of this set is supposed to be similar to the Nostromo and Alien. It's got these, you know, just a lot of the same textures, the kind of white walls with the hoses
and tubes and the ridges and all that. And everybody's sitting around and they're getting a briefing by Perkins, which is the company man, the guy played by lyman Ward, and he starts off telling them like, well, whatever reasons you had for signing up for this mission, you've got to do what the company says, which you know, okay, yeah, they probably know that. And he says, you got to get these these artifacts from the alien site. You've got to market, document it, and return any samples to NTI.
And everyone I think is mostly okay with it. They're like, Okay, there's not as much conflict over it.
Yep, yep, that's what's going on except one crew member. Actually, this is I think Slaydon, Beth Slaydon played by Wendy Shawl. She's like, wait a minute, if this is a research mission where we're just supposed to recover artifacts, why do we need a security officer? And then everybody looks over at Diane Salingers, just standing there in the corner of the room. She's looking very creepy at this point. She's
looking very stern and robotic. It almost seems like they are setting her up to be revealed later to be an android, but they're not. She's, as far as I could tell, she's just a regular human.
Yeah. Again, this is one of those characters it feels like the character was changed either in the course of writing or in the course of shooting the film, and they just like left previous incarnations of her there because what we have here is not what we get later on, and it's not one of those things where we feel like there's significant development to get to that change.
She looked very stern, and they've almost given her I don't know what you call it. It's not like gothy makeup, but she looks like she looks like she's a member of a German industrial metal band, but she's also wearing the uniform of a Formula one driver.
Yeah, her look is kind of I would say Zuole esque.
You know. Yeah, Yeah, that's good. And so Perkins can offer no explanation for why Bryce is here. He just walks away. And then the next scene is the ship's doctor, doctor Oliver, arguing with Bryce here because Bryce is confiscating and impounding drugs from the ship's onboard pharmacy and she's like, you have no right to take those, and Bryce doesn't speak at all. She's completely like zipper, lips, not a word, giving this glower at the doctor. The doctor eventually backs
down like she's afraid of her. She leaves. Later dialogue reveals that she was mostly making heavy sedatives, and then the doctor talks with a couple of other crew members. This is Finnel and Delambre about how they've been on the ship for three months and no one has heard Bryce talk. Isn't that weird? Once again sets it up like she's going to be a robot.
Yeah, I was expecting that to be the twist. And you know, this is another one of those cases where I'm reminded of something in a film that would have something in a film that would come much later. But she reminds me a bit of the Android ENFORCERR character that pops up in Jason X. She does, you know, right down to like the black Vinyl you know style outfit.
But without the cutesy attitude. Right, Okay, next scene, we're gonna meet some more characters we get We get a moment with the captain and with Slayden. This is Wendy Shawl again, so Slayden. When we first meet her, she's absorbed in a book and she's sort of ignoring the captain, Captain Davison, who's trying to talk to her. And what's that book she's reading that she just can't put down because it's just so good. This plot is so great.
It's scared to Death, the novelization of Scared to Death once again, the previous film of William Malone.
Love it in general, I love a fake book and a film. If it's central to the plot, great, If it's incidental, I'm also there for it.
This has got to be at least a second run. That's a paperback. I don't know. Maybe they never did a hardcover of Scared to Death. So anyway, this is a scene where we get to see a bit of Slayden and Davison's relationship. They are clearly they have romantic interest in each other, and they're kind of playful, like she's playfully ignoring him and reading the book. He's fussing over an asynchronous chess game that they've been playing for a while, and she's gloating about how she's going to
beat him soon. She's like, removes, I'll have checkmate, and she's like a commander doesn't need to have any brains, just a strong voice, and he's like, yeah, well, by the way, he's the captain, but she's like an engineer. She's like the tech whiz on the ship. On top of this, there's another scene where we get a romantic development, which is between these two other crew members, Fennel and Delambre.
They're like looking at Titan in the observation bay. She starts talking about how she knows that they're going to die there, and then they have some space romance.
Which you know it will become more important later on, and it leads into again some of the better sequences in the picture.
So when the ship arrives in orbit around Titan, they discovered there is another ship already there, a Richter Dynamics Dynamics ship that those are their West German corporate rivals. Remember,
and Captain Davison here is mad at Perkins. It seems you know, Perkins, the company man, he knows about this already, but everybody else was kept in the dark about the fact that it was a corporate arms race here and the captain is like, these crew members are civilians, they aren't trained to handle this kind of conflict, implying that things are likely to get violent between the two corporations, and Perkins is like, I don't worry about it. Bryce
here can handle any rough situations that come up. She's prepared. So it seems like they're going to be competing with Richter to get to the alien stuff. But again this is something that's like as with many things in this movie, like it sets up a plot dynamic only to not really have it go anywhere. But there's conflict in this
scene established between the captain and the company man. So Davison is like, okay, before we land, let's do it the safe way, and the company man is like, no, I insist you do it the stupid and dangerous way. That's an order, yep yep. So they do, and of course it's a bumpy landing. Once the ship lands, it ends up sinking through the surface of the planet and falls into an underground cavity, which I thought was a cool set piece. I like that.
Yeah, yeah, this possibility has come up on stuff to blow your mind before and talking about you know, landing on on on the Moon or on other planets, like this is an actual consideration that is taking into account, like can where can you land? Where can you land safely? Where can you land and have like a stable place for the spacecraft? So yeah, I don't know that I'd actually seen it explored in this fashion in a film before, so I like it.
The ship is damaged, of course in the crash landing, so They're really in a pickle now. They're like, how are we going to get out of this? Davison's like, okay, we got a radio the Richter ship for help. We got to say, you know, please help us, even though you're our corporate rivals. You know, our lives are in danger. And Perkins is like, no, no, we will not do that, and he threatens the captain's job. And the captain doesn't care, you know. He's like, the lives of my crew are
more important than your profits. And Perkins isn't so sure about that. Yeah, but it's time to suit up, go outside. I guess I don't remember how they get to that point.
But I think they have to basically, like they try hailing the Richter Dynamic ship and they're not hearing anything back, so they basically have to go and knock. And there's added back and forth where our corporate stooge is like, well, we got to bring Bryce and the big gun, and they're like, we're not bringing the gun. We're going to ask for help, and they're like, okay, she can bring the gun.
So they do that. They suit up, they go outside. Basically everybody goes except I think a couple of people and they find some kind of so did you understand what they're going to? Hear as the German ship. They go to some kind of built infrastructure, and at first I thought this was more of the alien ruins. But do you think it's actually the German ship they're going to?
I believe so, but only because I went back and rewatched the first portion of the film and felt a little more confident that that's where they're going.
So the team, you know, they do very it's your standard kind of like sci fi environment exploring thing. The team splits up, and then the parts that's up split up again, so everybody's getting isolated so they can have scary little experiences. Inside the ship, they find breathable air and decide to remove their helmets. Always a good choice.
Yeah, they're like, the air's good, let's do it.
Inside the labs within the ship, they find some large capsule shaped chests that viewers may remember from twenty minutes ago in the opening scene, and Delambre is looking at a capsule. She thinks it looks like some kind of egg and starts to examine it. There's one part here where she just like eats something sitting on a table and I was like, like, did you know a jolly rancher?
And she just sticks it up and eat it. Yeah, like it feels natural for her. Like, but I'm like, what are you doing? This is this is a this is a biologically unstable environment. I don't eat random jolly ranchers or whatever.
But it looks so good. You know, I had to get this jelly roll here.
The West Germans. They have great confections. You know. You can't say no to it.
Ik benin contaminant. So she eats whatever it is and then oh, and then she stumbles across a bunch of dead bodies in the room, and then an alien pops out and is like ah, So she runs away and finds her crewmates and they investigate and who's coming to save the day? Of course it's Bryce, the security officer. She's got her weapon drawn, and all of a sudden, just like, here's the creature. I don't know if they paste this out the right way. Getting to the creature revealed.
It's true that you don't get a good look at it yet, but I feel like its presence and in this moment is too sudden and overt. It doesn't really have a good build up.
Yeah, and we don't. I mean they do hold back a little bit like we're not full reveal, but I think too much is revealed, and then it ends up feeling like, Okay, here's our monster, but our monster just kind of like ends up working through underlings for the rest of the picture before coming back once more at the end.
Yeah. So Bryce kind of blasts at it with her ray gun, but that does and do anything. So the crew members have to run away and they slip through. This is a set piece I often like in sci fi movies when there's like an automatically closing mechanical door and the characters are trying to get through it fast enough, and one character is not able to get there before it slams shut. It's Delambre. She's stuck outside and the creature gets her.
We get it, and again we get another the fact that this movie really loves quick splash of blood against the glass on that door.
I remember her boyfriend was Finnel and he's right there when it happens. He freaks out and Bryce just jabs him in the head with an injector. Everybody's like, what are you doing? And then for the first time Bryce speaks, she's like, don't worry, it's just a tranquilizer. Oh okay, cool.
Yeah, So I guess this is what she was stealing all those drugs for, so that she could trank crew members at a moment's notice.
Right, if you just saw your lover get killed by an alien, I can stab you in the head with a tranquilizer and you will fall instantly unconscious. That makes sense.
She doesn't want that those stressed eyes to stack up too much, I guess.
So everybody leaves the labs and they come back out into the caves where the rest of the crew members are waiting, and then here for some reason, even though there may have been a good reason for this, but I don't recall what it was. Even though one member of the crew has just been killed by an alien, they just keep exploring the caves and they come across the lab where the two geologists got gooped in the intro I believe, And then we get a jump scare
with one of them uncovering something. I think it's one of the bodies from the first mission. But eventually they go back to the ship and here we get some developments. First, there's sort of a quiet, tender, nice conversation between Davison and Sladen. She's like, do you think we're going to die? And he says no, but he gives her a task. He asks her to put together a certain kind of
transmitter device to radio the space station for help. But then I was thinking, wait, the space station that exploded? Do they know it exploded?
Maybe there's a closer station, A little sketchy on what all's out there?
Maybe it only partially exploded. But then the movie kind of kicks into high gear because we're about to meet klaus Kinski in fact, so we see like Bryce the security officer is alone, she's like in her quarters, like changing, and suddenly she is attacked from out of nowhere by klaus Kinski. Fortunately she manages to subdue him. But I was just thinking, no, kill him now.
Yes, yeah, because he comes off like he's just a complete animal, like he might. You're like, maybe he's even a zombie at this point and you should just put put one in his head.
But no, he reveals himself to be not zombified yet he is human and he's just he's just all over the place. I mentioned her, I was going to come back to this, Kinski as usual in any movie, Like you know, whenever he's on screen, it's kind of hard to take your eyes off him. He is, he has that spellbinding quality on screen, but it's like he's doing a completely different take on the character in every shot.
In some takes, he's playing him as like an obsessed, paranoid madman who's trying to warn everyone else of the danger. In other takes, he's playing as a kind of relatively calm, friendly, helpful guy making good sense. In other takes, he's a malevolent sexual predator who's like violent to the rest of the crew. There's like no consistency whatsoever from moment to moment with him.
Yeah, I mean, it reminds me again of that famous moment at the famous scene at the very end of Herzog's Gary The Wrath of God, where Kinsky's character has this like final monologue and it's rather subdued and very powerful. But according to Herzog, it's like Kinsky didn't want to do it subdued. He wanted to do it high energy and raging, and so Herzog just made him do it over and over, were in over again, until he was just so like weakened that he actually delivered it at
the level that Herzog wanted. So it's like, that's the kind of stuff you apparently had to do to get what you wanted out of Kinski. So yeah, and then add into the fact that some of the shots that he did for Creature were unusable because he was out of focus. So you know, they're left just having, I guess, to to use what they were able to get from him, no matter how different it is seem to see.
So from here we get a number of different plot developments. One is that the crew is running low on air, so Bryce has to go out to collect air tanks from the dead astronauts, and for some reason, Hoffner is allowed to go with her, even though he has already violently attacked her earlier and he will continue to do so as they go out.
Yeah, yeah, completely nonsensible.
So they then they see a bunch of dead guys while they're collecting the air tanks, and then something pops out at them and we assume they were attacked by the alien. By the way, Hoffner does deliver some lines, but it's kind of hard to process the content of them. He's talking to the crew and he talks about how
the alien let's see. He reveals that he has a bunch of bombs on his ship that they could use to destroy the alien, and he also reveals that it wasn't just the alien attacking them, but it used the crew members to get each other. He said that it was which this doesn't really match with what he was just saying, but he says it's a form of collective intelligence. And we will see how this works in just a bit.
Yeah, And one of these sequences is where he's eating the sandwich right, yes, where that just took me out of it because I'm like, did they want him to eat the sandwich or is he like I'm eating the sandwich in the scene? I don't know.
So we come to another scene where Finnel this is the character played by Robert Chaffey, is lying by a window in the ship. He's recovering from his wounds and from the tranquilizer dose after he saw his his lover killed by an alien, and then suddenly outside the window
on the surface of the planet, he sees Delambre. She's there and she asks for his help, and despite having seen her die, Finyl does go out to find her, he puts on his suit, he goes to get her, and she is, of course now a zombie working for the alien. With this dynamic that develops is that a character who you thought was killed will come back with some kind of brain slug attached to their head. So like one side of the head, they've got a throbbing,
slimy mass there and it's controlling their activity. And so the zombie brain slug Delombree seduces Phinyl on the planet's surface and then seemingly infects him with the brain slug of his own.
Yeah, like pulls his helmet off on the planet's surface. This whole sequence is great. Like I think Malone said that originally they were going to shoot it entirely within the ship, but then they ended up going with this. You know, she's outside, she's almost like finds me of scenes like I guess this was in Salem's Lot with the vampire on the outside of the window asking to be let in.
You know, very spooky.
Yeah, it has that power to it. So Yeah, for my money, this is the creepiest sequence in the whole picture. Doesn't have a outright monster in it, you know, has a like a brain slug controlled vampire and it's really effective.
After this, the crew that's left on the Shenandoah, they get like a zoom a call from Finnyl. He video calls them and he's like, hey, I'm over here on the German ship, and they're like, how'd you get there? He's like, I walked. I came over here because it has air, and you know you're running out of air over there, so come join me. So Davison, Perkins, and the Doctor all go over to the German ship and join him there because because they can get air there,
Sladen stays behind on the other ship. They are greeted by Finnel, who has a mysterious dig around his head, and they're like, hey, what's that. He's like, oh, yeah, there were some caustic chemicals that burned me, so that's why I've got this. By the way, doctor, come with me. Let's get away from everybody else. And there is actually, I think a quite effectively staged creepy moment here where so Jaffy is, you know, leading the doctor character alone
down a hall. She's supposed to be, I think, checking out his wound while he fixes something in the engine room and he opens the doors to the engine room and it's just black inside. There's no light, and he's like, ah, darn it, you know the lights are out. Just let me go fix it. I'll be right back, and then he just goes in the door, and we don't cut away.
The camera stays on the doctor just standing there at the open door leading into the dark room, and then we don't hear anything inside, and it goes on for a bit, and I thought this was a really effective moment where it just goes on and on a little bit and you don't know what's happening, and she starts calling out to him, like what's going on, and then he's like, oh, yeah, I'm in here. I'm almost done, and she eventually goes in and of course gets zombiefied.
Yep, they get her.
Now. Eventually, the captain and the company man, who have been at odds the whole time, they grow suspicious because they're like, man, this ship is so hot and we're sweating through our outfits here. But they recalled that Finyl was not sweating. That's weird. So they get suspicious and they're like, we got to go check things out. But by the time they get there, the doctor has already been killed, and then zombie Finnel attacks the captain, only to have his zombie head blown off by Perkins with
his blaster. So the company man comes to the rescue.
Yep, Ferris Bueller's dad blows the head off of the Jaffy zombie s face zombie and it's a great head explosion, like it's a full on like Scanner's esque sloppy head explosion, but also a little bit funny, like it's the right balance, the perfect bounce.
Yeah. Meanwhile, back on the other ship, remember Sladen's the only character left there, so she's doing her engineering work. I think she's trying to fix the radio or something. And oh, here's Klaus Kinski, but he's zombie Fyte also, so he's also been killed and brain slugged, and he is attacking Sladen though you know he was attacking people before he had a brain slug.
Yeah, he's even more terrifying now because, like the Kinsky skull is a great skull upon which to build your yeah, your special effects makeup. So he looks terrifying.
So he chases her outside and eventually into the German ship. There's there's a fight where Davison and Perkins have to save her from the Kinsky zombie. They rip the slug off of Hoffner's head and throw it on the ground and stomp on it and squish it. A good conclusion, and thus concludes the tale of the Hoffner Zombie. So there are apparently only three characters left. We've got Captain Davison, the company man, Perkins, and Sladen the engineer. They're the
only ones left. And what are they going to do to defeat the big alien? Because remember there's also the different thing. There's the alien they encountered at the beginning in the ship here, apart from all the zombies that it is apparently making. I think maybe the brain slug is like part of the alien that comes off of it and reanimates the corpses of the humans that it has killed.
I don't have a clear understanding. I don't know if the yeah, these are part of the alien's anatomy, or these are other organisms that it is using, or this is biotechnology. It's left wide open, so I don't know. I don't have any strong theories.
But anyway, we get to a thing next that I absolutely love, which is Slayden's plan for defeating the alien. And what she says is, I have an idea. I saw a movie once where people were trapped on an ice station by a carrot from outer space and they killed it by electrocuting it. They set up a grid on the floor as a trap and they lured it onto the and they electrocuted it. And I realized, and they for Perkins and Davison laugh at her, but then
they end up going with her plan. And I think this is great because she is accurately describing the plot of the thing from another world.
Yeah. Absolutely, it's I really enjoyed just how overt it was too. It would be like if like what if Ripley an alien had said, you know, I saw a movie once where a little boy was left home alone at Christmas and he outwitted the enemies with a series of clever traps. Let's do that. Let's do home alone on this alien.
Do we have a BB gun on board? I need paint cans.
But they agree, like this, we can do this. We can we have even more power on the ship. We can route into this system.
Let's do it. Yep. So they do it, and it's Layton's plan and they have to like, you know, guard her while she's doing all the electrical work that needs to be done. But she she arranges it and it works, or so it seems. They zap the monster with all this electricity. It falls dead, apparently, and then the two guys wander off to go, I don't know, do something else. But then Slaydon is like, oh, she's a little curious.
Maybe she's not sure it's dead. So she goes over to give it a little nudge with the tip of her shoe, and then we get a classic dead monster revival. It pops up. We get the monster pop up. Gotta love it.
That's right, we're gonna have to move on to Plan B. Right, you know what B stands for.
It stands for better depend on the company.
Man.
See, he actually has a surprising arc so per So the monster pops up, it seizes Slaydon. The two guys go to investigate, and they like look through the glass in the hallway and they see that Slaydon is there. She's alive, but she is unconscious, being held hostage, like hanging upside down, guarded by the alien. So they're like, what are we gonna do? What are we gonna do? And Perkins comes up with the plan. He's like, we
got to blow it out of the airlock. There you go in the medh And while he's trying to set up this plan, he finds the bombs that Kinsky was talking about, so he's like, oh yeah, here are some bombs also. So while he's like setting up that blow it out the airlock trap, Davison goes into the room and rescues Slaydon and meanwhile the alien attacks Perkins. The company man. It attacks him, and then the other two characters come and find him as sort of in a
gory embrace with the alien. It's like ripping out his neck. They're both sitting right on the trap door of the airlock and Perkins looks at them and he's like, you've got it right where you want it to do it. Do it. So they hit the button and Perkins and the alien get dumped outside, so company Man to the
rescue in the end. And I think it's an interesting arc because it's the opposite of the Burke arc in Aliens, where in Aliens Burke seems like a nice guy at first, and then as the story progresses, he is revealed to be a a through and through slime ball and a complete coward and only interested in himself. Perkins is kind of the opposite. At first. He's he's a you know, a hard nosed, you know, totally selfish, bottom line kind of guy who doesn't care about anybody else. But he
sort of saves the day here. Yeah, but it doesn't last because well, they dump it out the airlock. But then the alien just sort of comes around the side of the building like it comes in through the other entrance. But when it does, it's still got the bomb that Perkins had stuck to it. So Davison is like, well, I gotta deal with this, and so he goes and meets it at the airlock and drop kicks the alien
back outside. Great, yes, very good. He's like fighting it outside where it said that the temperature is like negative two hundred degrees fahrenheit, and like he can't breathe, there's no atmosphere he can breathe. So he's like choking and he sees the bomb timer on the alien go down to zero, but then it doesn't explode, and Davison, lying there on the exposed surface of Saturn's moon titan, chokes out the line it didn't go off to no one
in particular. There's nobody out there to hear him, except suddenly a character who we thought was dead, the security officer Bryce. She appears from out of nowhere in a spacesuit with her blaster and shoots the bomb and then says, oh, yes it did, replying to his it didn't go off, and then the alien explodes and that's the end.
That's great. They do a Jaws on it, basically, yeah, yeah, something explosive strapped to our monster. Shoot the object, blow it up.
You see it.
You see a Jaws pulled on monsters now and again in these types of films, it's always a nice moment.
What did you so? Then we so this time it's defeated for real, and our survivors blast off and head back to Earth, I guess. And the survivors again are Davison, Slayton, and Bryce, And what did you make of the I got lost thing? They're like, what what happened to you? We thought you were dead? And then she sort of sheepishly admits I got lost, and I think she says it multiple times. What's going on there?
I have no idea, no idea what they intended with that if it's supposed to just be funny, or if it was just kind of like a patchwork, like they felt like they had to acknowledge it. I didn't feel like they had to acknowledge where she was at all, Like she almost died in some encounter with a with the alien that ended up turning Hans Rudy into a zombie. So I don't really think I needed an explanation of where she was, but I guess the film felt otherwise.
Well, anyway, they're headed home. Oh and then a laugh out loud moment for me was Bryce hands Slade in her copy of the novelization of Scared to Death, the director's other film, like oh great, thank you, and that's the end.
She points out earlier that it's the only book she brought. That's why she keeps reading it, and she likes it. Yes, so there's not a great library on the Shenandoa a lot of hallendin Foster.
Well.
I was gonna say, you just basically they got Scared to Death and dianetics.
You know, you're just speaking of novelizations. I noticed that there's like a contemporary author who has gone back and made novelizations for various films that didn't have them, including Creature. So there is a novelization of Creature out there, but it's like a recent work of fiction, so don't I don't know what it's like, but I admire the hustle there.
Maybe it'll fill in some of the plot gaps and make more of like the okay, so things we mentioned earlier that did not really end up playing a big role. The corporate rivalry. I mean it's a little bit there in the setting, like, okay, so there's another a ship from another company, but like they play it up like the corporate rivalry is going to be a conflict within the plot, and it just isn't really.
Yeah, yeah, there's the whole issue robot and she doesn't talk, doesn't really go anywhere. There are a lot of things like that in this film, which you know, you don't have to you don't. You don't have to fire every canon you bring on the deck, you know. I recently reread Frank Herbert's Done Again, and honestly, one of the pleasures that I really love in that book is are the various ideas and tangents that that aren't explored that we the places where it seems like the plot could go,
but they don't. Like, there's this whole, this brief bit where they're like where it's mentioned that that pider de vere the twisted mentat of the Baron Harken and may be intending to obtain a Chris Knife, and then since he has blue the blue eyes of the Fremen, he's going to potentially go out and pretend to be a Fremen to work his evil on the surface of Aracus. And that never comes to fruition. But it's just one of those little teases of like, wow, what if what
if it had gone in that direction? What would have that consisted of? So you know, it's you know, you can you can lay out possibilities and not follow through on them. But there are a number of those moments in this film that ultimately feel again more like in the moment editing and changing rather than an exploration of possibility.
They feel more accidentally abandoned rather than intentionally abandoned.
Yeah, but still, I have to say, a really fun flick, some fun effects, some fun performances, and some legitimately creepy moments, coupled with some moments that are a little wonk here, Like we were saying when the monster is finally fully present in these final moments, there's often an undeniable, like rubber suit feel to it. It's a pretty good rubber suit, you know, but it's you know, it is what it is.
I liked it when we saw the monster. I mean, obviously it's supposed to look like the monster from Alien and it doesn't look realistic. But I love the look like it's fun.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's you know, it's nice and greasy and oily, and it's got It looks a lot like a xenomorph in some respects, but it has like big red eyes that glow. And then of course it's slinging brain slugs at people, and we're not entirely sure if those are of its body, if those are biotechnology, or if it's another species that he uses who knows.
Well. I in the end also very much enjoyed creature.
Yeah, I mean, enjoyment is key. Absolutely all other concerns secondary. All right, We're gonna gohea and close the book on Creature aka Titan find here, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there if you have thoughts on it from watching it back in the day, from watching it for the first time now or rediscovering it and so forth, or if you have thoughts in general on Alien and Alien clones that came out afterwards, films that led up to Alien. All of this is stuff we would love
to talk about. And we still may come back and do Ridley Scott's Alien here on Weird House Cinema in the future, or maybe we'll just do another knockoff at some point. I don't know that both are fun possibilities.
I think it's unavoidable that we will do multiple Alien knockoffs in the future. There are a lot of them. We'll we'll get around to.
Them, all right. Just a reminder that Stuff to Blow your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film here on Weird House Cinema. You want to see a list of all the all the films we've done over the years, the best place to do that is go on over to letterbox dot com. It's l E T T E R B O x D dot com. Our username is weird House and we have a list.
There you can look at all the films, you can look at all the box arts, almost like a little little digital version of of a movie rental place. And indeed, you know, it's hooked up so that when you click on a title, you can click at where to find and it'll tell you, oh, well, you can buy it, rent it digitally here, you can stream it here, you
can buy a physical copy here. It's often a great like a great resource for me when I'm looking at potential films to cover on Weird House and I have to tackle that big question, how are we going to watch it? Where are you going to seek it out? Can we stream it? Can we get a hold of a digital release? Has it been remastered? Or are we going to have to you know, look for some sort of a what was the way that we watched the work? Best movie? That was like a Dutch subtitled YouTube rip
or something? Yes, yes, not the preferred format.
Huge things. As always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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