CREATURE (1985)

KINSKI, EXPLODING HEADS SAVE THIS 'CREATURE' FEATURE

Miami Herald, The (FL) - May 28, 1985

Author: BILL COSFORD Herald Movie Critic

Creature is a clone of Alien (1979), even down to the advertising art work, which shows the creature bearing a marked resemblance to the alien -- something of a cross between an alligator and an anteater with an overdose of implacable evil thrown in. This makes Creature something of a genre straggler, the market for horror -in-space having peaked a couple years ago, and the film would be unremarkable except for the presence among the cast of Klaus Kinski, who is undeniably the weirdest star in contemporary motion pictures.

Kinski could probably name his project, but with very few exceptions -- Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo the most recent and notable -- he seems to prefer potboilers; as he said several years ago, "I like bad cinema."

Creature is indeed pretty bad, though it does have some competent effects work, including one of the better exploding- head sequences since Brian De Palma perfected the art in The Fury.

As it happens, however, Kinski's screen time is not large. He plays the lone survivor of a German deep-space research mission menaced by the creature, and as is so often the case in his "special-guest" appearances, his character acts according to motives that are at best obscure. His first move upon making contact with a rival American research team is the attempted rape of their security chief, a towering dominatrix named Bryce. Only after she whaps him around her neon-and-chrome boudoir does Klaus settle down and warn the rest of the folks what they're up against: a 200,000-year-old carnivore that controls its victims by putting little brain-eating crabs on their heads and letting them burrow for the cerebrum.

The only time Creature is at all fun is when the Kinski character reverts to form, lunging at Bryce while they're on patrol, cackling happily when she cuffs him across his life- support system. It's a shame when the braineater finally gets to him, and his head swells up.

By that time the movie is irredeemably formulaic, departing
from the plot of the far superior Alien only in minor detail. As usual, Kinski is ill-used by his pot-boiling bosses, who always miss the point: He makes a far better villain than the most fearsome of anteaters; he's even implacable.

Creature (R) **

CAST

Stan Ivar, Wendy Schaal, Marie Laupin, Lyman Ward, Robert Jaffe, Annette McCarthy, Diane Salinger, Klaus Kinski.

CREDITS

Director: William Malone. Producers: William Dunn, William Malone. Screenwriters: William Malone, Alan Reed. Cinematographer: Harry Mathias. Music: Thomas Chase, Steve Rucker.

A CFR Corporation release. Running time: 92 minutes. Vulgar language, nudity, sexual situations, violence and gore.

Herald movie critics rate movies from zero to four stars.

**** Excellent *** 1/2 Very Good

*** Good ** 1/2 Worth Seeing ** Fair

* Poor Zero: Worthless
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'CREATURE' REVEALS ITSELF AS ANOTHER SCI-FI RIPOFF

SACRAMENTO BEE - April 29, 1985

Author: George Williams Bee Reviewer

YOU HAVE TO to admire the audacity of Creature with its bargain-basement sets, soap-opera acting - and its grand larceny of plot lines from about a dozen other sci-fi horror flicks. The backdrops and the actors are neatly woven into this claustrophobic adventure, and the stolen scenes were lifted from some very good movies.

When an American space vehicle lands on a moon of Saturn, it finds a German mission got there first, but there is no sign of life from the still-steaming craft. The American crew, half men, half women, is low on oxygen and attempts to borrow some from their European colleagues, only to find the Germans have been vulturized by an outer-space monster who is still hungry and still around.

The monster was aboard an ancient spaceship that crashed on the moon 200 centuries earlier. It was part of an insect collection gathered from throughout the universe. It was resting harmlessly in a cocoon until the earth visitors blundered onto it and cracked the cocoon's shell. As one of the earthlings says, It does not become a butterfly in the summer.

Among the actors, Klaus Kinski is particularly hammy as a German astronaut who turns up as the only survivor of his mission - or is he? Stan Ivar as the American commander, Wendy Schaal as his chief electronics officer, Lyman Ward representing the corporation that built the American craft and Diane Salinger as the security officer all seem to have learned their lines well and almost make it through the movie without tripping over the scenery.

The lighting is restrained, and most of the low-budget sets are hidden in shadows. This helps to heighten the realistic feeling of Creature, which is ably directed by William Malone, who also helped to write the derivative script. Malone keeps his cameras focused on tight little corners to create a closed-in kind of atmosphere that makes for some edge-of-the-seat moments when you forget you've seen this same story in a movie at least a dozen times before.

CREATURE

Cast: Klaus Kinski, Stan Ivar, Wendy Schaal, Lyman Ward, Diane Salinger. Director: William Malone. Screenplay: Malone and Alan Reed. Photography: Harry Mathias. Distributor: Cardinal Entertainment Corp. and Trans Word Entertainment Inc. Running time: 91 minutes.

Arden, State, Birdcage, and Forty Niner and Sacramento drive-ins.

Rating: R, for violence, some nudity.