Creature aka Titan Find (1985)

(In French, On Cable TV, July 2021) I’m reasonably sure I’ve seen Creature as a teenager: There’s something very familiar about its ending, in which the protagonist and two attractive women return home to Earth in a capsule during a weeks-long trip—with the film practically winking at the audience, “guess what they’re going to do during that time?”  Or I may have let my hyper-libidinous teenage imagination run away with the situation. There’s no way to be sure, not with the incredibly generic narrative that the film rips off from Alien. Once more, a spaceborne crew discovers an alien creature and gets slaughtered and you don’t really need more details than that, right? There are plenty of goop and black chitin and spikes and egg-laying parasites to go around, but the film itself is incredibly familiar. There’s probably a completely terrible movie marathon to be made from Alien clones (starting with Galaxy of Terror, then on to a few others), but the shocking thing is that Creature is probably among the best or rather the least awful of them. There’s some science-fictional awareness in the script (notably in referencing the classic The Creature from Outer Space), none other than Klaus Kinski drops by to chew some scenery worse than the alien, and the special effects are not that bad. (Ironically enough, some of the SFX crew would then go on to work on Aliens.)  It’s not much, but considering the abysmal quality of the subgenre, Creature is already far ahead of the pack. If you’re really digging for compliments, let’s just say that there’s a pleasant fuzziness to the early 1980s low-budget look and let’s leave it at that. Amusingly, it seems to be in the public domain, so there’s really no way to stop you from watching it.