CREATURE - 1985
Transworld Entertainment / Diamond Entertainment (current distributor)
Rating: Australia, USA: R / France: -12 / Norway: 18 / UK: 18 |
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Once upon a time there was this Writer / Director named William Malone. William
Malone saw the movie ALIEN and said to himself "I can make a movie worse than that!" and he went forward and wrote and directed SCARED TO DEATH which even went so far as to have a H.R. Giger rip-off of
the ALIEN design (Malone
called it "Syngenor" or some such crap). That was 1981.
A few years later, William Malone decided that he could re-make his own rip-off of
his own movie and he co-wrote and directed CREATURE.
This movie was like SCARED TO DEATH in many ways, in that it was a rip-off of ALIEN and even went so far as
to have an H.R. Giger rip-off of the ALIEN design (Willy
didn't name it this time).
A few more years passed, 14 to be exact, before William Malone's prose once again
proved that he was unbankable as a writer. He wrote the wretchedly bad
UNIVERSAL SOLDIER II starring Jean Claude Van Damme - whose only competitor
in the category of Worst Martial Art Movies Ever Made is Steven Seagal (wouldn't it be funny if these two got into an argument over who was the BETTER actor? It actually happened on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Steven started it. Van Damme wouldn't play).
You would think that Hollywood would have learned by now, yet the contract was already
set and filming was already completed on 2000's SUPERNOVA (which avoided the label of worst movie of the year only because John Travolta released the embarrassingly bad BATTLEFIELD EARTH, as a tribute to his God, in the same year. That and the standard assembly-line work of BOOK OF SHADOWS: Blair Witch
2). For SUPERNOVA, William Malone merely dusted
off his plot device to SCARED TO DEATH and CREATURE and re-made the whole
ALIEN rip-off furshlugginer mess yet AGAIN!
There were some critics who called SUPERNOVA original. The poor fools.
William Malone co-wrote CREATURE with Alan Reed, who was never heard from again (movie
wise). The movie starts out as hack as possible. There is this
evil corporation see? And they have landed on this planet and discovered
this ancient alien wreck, see? They find a pod and the varmint inside
up and attacks them!
On my video box, the tagline says: "ITS BEEN SLEEPING FOR 2000 YEARS, UNTIL
NOW." In the movie they date it as being two HUNDRED thousand years, but whose counting? The Creature wakes up and Merry Mishaps Occur.
Cut To: A 1950s style of orbiting space station. A space craft is heading right
toward it on a collision course. It's too late to turn to avoid it. Why
didn't they see it sooner? "Maybe it was hidden behind a passing
spaceship?" is the timid theory. No time to slap your drones around
for incompetence. The spaceship hits the space station and KA-BOOM!
Now what did that scene have to do with the rest of the movie? Not a Goddam thing!
Go figure!
Soon another spacecraft is headed for the planet where the first spacecraft disappeared.
This spaceship is from a competing evil corporation and they want to know
whats-a going on down thar!
Oh, did I mention the spacesuits? No? Well, the spacesuits were designed to look
like the spacesuits from 2001: A Space Odyssey, except that the space helmets
all have bright lights inside that shine Right-Into-The-Face! Now
how in the world are you going to see anything with a bright light shining Right In Your Face???
200 million+ years of human evolution and I'm wasting that struggle watching movies
like this.
The Commander of the mission is Ferris Bueller's Father (Lyman Ward). The Captain of the spacecraft is Soap Opera staple actor Stan Ivar. There is also The Penguin's Mother, Mrs. Cobblepot (Diane
Salinger), who plays Security Officer Bryce. Bryce plays it cold
and sinister. Apparently, the whole crew has been in space for 3 months
and she has never said a word to anyone. She also intimidates the hell
out of all, especially the ship's doctor.
When their craft - The Shenandoah (puh-leeze!) - finally lands on the planet that is not planet
LV-426, the crew finds an ancient derelict (no shit?),
another spaceship, and a monster in the dark. Now the movie has established
Security Officer Bryce as this silent and dangerous type, right? Bryce
gets a mere glimpse of the Creature and screams, running away and closing
the door on one of her crewmembers, thereby leaving her for the monster
to . . . er . . . do monstrous things to. Throughout the rest of the flick
Bryce is not called on her blatant cowardice or even the fact that she
killed a fellow crewmember. Her act of spinelessness is simply forgotten!
Ahh . . . but in addition to ripping off ALIEN, Malone's script also rips off John
Carpenter's THE THING and Robert Heinlien's THE PUPPET MASTERS. Monster murdered
members of the crew return to life - except that they now have baby creatures
eating their brains and making them do things.
At any rate, Hans Rudy Hoffner (Klaus Kinski: DIE TOTEN AUGEN
VON LONDON, CIRCUS OF FEAR, DIE BLAU HAND, EL CONDE DRACULA, NELLA STRETTA
MORSA DEL RAGNO, SCHIZOID, VENOM, NOSFERATU [1979], CRAWLSPACE),
who is the last surviving member of the other evil corporation spaceship (they were all German - a thin plot device that
comes in later), sneaks in through the Shenandoah's backdoor (?)
and finds Bryce in her room taking off her space suit a la Sigourney Weaver
from ALIEN. She gets naked and leaves her bedroom door open? Fine then!
Hoffner starts raping her. Bryce kicks his ass for it but in the very
next scene, the Captain and surviving crewmembers are asking him questions
and accepting his help. Worse! They trust him to help them! They Trust
A Rapist! They send Hoffner and Bryce (these two of all people? He's a rapist! She is a murderous coward!) to
his German spacecraft to fetch some stuff and off they go; with Hoffner
grabbing Bryce's ass along the way.
Naturally they run into the CREATURE and Merry Mishaps Occur yet again.
For those of you who loved old Klaus Kinski - warts and all (let's
face it, the man had an extraordinary life. Not one I'd want to live,
but K2 seemed to enjoy being a human trainwreck and he lived long enough
to tell about it!), you are going to love this pic. It features
Klaus at his mind-numbing worst - which ironically is the absolute best
of most actors. If you don't understand this logic, you have to see Klaus
in action. The man was known to beat up his director if he didn't like
what was going on.
CREATURE contains gratuitous scenes of nudity, face ripping, head explosions and
other types of gore. This is always appreciated in movies of this low
caliber.
On the plus side, as bad a Writer as William Malone is, he is pretty good
as a Director. The action is non-stop, never lags, and the editing is
crisp. The lighting of the scary scenes is suitably dark and forbidding.
If this was a good story with good dialogue it would have been great,
but Malone was stuck in a Sucking-The-ALIEN-Franchise-Teat rut that lasted
nearly 20 years. Worse, the story was loaded with done to death hack and
cliché plot devices and the worst of Horror Movie stupidities ("There's
a monster killing us all and he is in this spaceship with us! So let's
split up and go look for it!").
Malone finally broke free when he directed THE HOUSE
ON HAUNTED HILL (1999). After SCARED
TO DEATH, CREATURE, UNIVERSAL SOLDIER II and SUPERNOVA, it's amazing that anyone trusted him wth a flick again. How lucky for
us all that someone did, because THE
HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL freaking Rocked!
Once again we were presented with Malone's love of dark corridors and claustrophobic
lighting - the things he saw in ALIEN that left him so enraptured - but
the screenplay was totally out of his hands and the movie was far better
for it. In fact, THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1999) is one of the best Horror movies ever made.
Unfortunately, the movie was written by Dick Beebe, who did such a great job that Artisan
hired him to write BOOK OF SHADOWS: Blair Witch
2, which tanked and de-railed any possible future for the BLAIR WITCH
PROJECT series. Just as well probably.
As for CREATURE, two Shriek Girls.
This review
copyright 2001 E.C.McMullen Jr.
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