Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind, This is Rob Lamb.
Speaker 1: Yesterday was Alien Day, So here's an Alien knockoff from
Speaker 1: the vault for you. This is going to be our
Speaker 1: episode from June twenty eighth, twenty twenty four about the
Speaker 1: film Creature. This one, this one's this one's really cool
Speaker 1: because it's an obvious obviously inspired by the original Alien,
Speaker 1: but as we discuss, also kind of predicts some of
Speaker 1: the plot features of Aliens. It has has a lot
Speaker 1: of weird stuff in it. It's a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: Let's dive right in.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. A production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey you, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
Speaker 3: And this is Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House,
Speaker 3: we're going to be talking about the nineteen eighty five
Speaker 3: sci fi thriller Creature, widely regarded as one of the
Speaker 3: many copycats of nineteen seventy nine's Alien, though I want
Speaker 3: to say, to be fair to Creature, it actually copies
Speaker 3: a number of different movies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, and he gets into you also end
Speaker 1: up getting into that area where it's like, all right,
Speaker 1: it was inspired by some of the films that inspired Alien,
Speaker 1: so you know, some of it kind of evens out
Speaker 1: in the wash, but it is. So I've been getting
Speaker 1: into Alien content a lot recently. I've been rewatching the
Speaker 1: original films. I'm gonna be running the Alien RPG game
Speaker 1: from Free League here with some friends. And also we
Speaker 1: have a new Alien picture coming up in a couple
Speaker 1: of months, Alien Romulus. So you know, I'm geeking out
Speaker 1: for all of these things. So in addition to rewatching
Speaker 1: the original films, I've also been digging in a bit
Speaker 1: into some of these Alien knockoffs an Alien inspired films,
Speaker 1: some of which I've never seen before, some of which
Speaker 1: I have been avoiding, some of which I'll probably can
Speaker 1: continue to avoid. But this one is often held up
Speaker 1: as being one of the more entertaining ones.
Speaker 3: You know, I was having a thought about that Alien RPG,
Speaker 3: which looks very fun and I would like to play it,
Speaker 3: but I was thinking about how it shows the way
Speaker 3: that character cliches turn into character types, so that like
Speaker 3: things that are established in these movies as like, oh
Speaker 3: here's just a type of character you see in Alien
Speaker 3: or Aliens, and then a lot of its copycats that
Speaker 3: apparently in this game becomes a class, like you would
Speaker 3: have classes of characters in D and D. So in
Speaker 3: D and D you've got wizards and rogues and you know,
Speaker 3: and warlocks and all that, and apparently in this alien
Speaker 3: game you've got company men. I think you can be
Speaker 3: like a Burk, You've got space marines, you can be
Speaker 3: a Vasquez. You've got like all those types of characters
Speaker 3: are classes, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Like you can be a marine, you can be you
Speaker 1: can be a Marshall company agent.
Speaker 3: You can be a kid.
Speaker 1: Of course kids have special rules and so forth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I'm really excited to play it. I think it
Speaker 1: does a pretty phenomenal job of taking the Alien films
Speaker 1: like accepting everything and then managing to do a lot
Speaker 1: of great world building out of it. So solid recommendation
Speaker 1: thus far from me. But I'm not actually playing it
Speaker 1: for the first time until tonight.
Speaker 3: I would want to play as a slimy whyland UTAWNI
Speaker 3: suit that my class. Yeah, it's pretty great.
Speaker 1: There's one of those in the scenario that I'm running tonight.
Speaker 3: Oh but wait, sorry, because you were in the middle
Speaker 3: of talking about how I know you haven't just been
Speaker 3: on a kick of strictly Alien and Alien franchise stuff,
Speaker 3: but everything in that zone of storytelling and media, right,
Speaker 3: Like you've been going back to the to the pre
Speaker 3: Alien stuff, Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean like one of the classics, of course is
Speaker 1: Mario Bob has Planned to the Vampires, which we've previously
Speaker 1: discussed on Weird House. Another one that I recently watched,
Speaker 1: probably for the first time in full, was John Carpenter
Speaker 1: and Dan O'Bannon's Dark Star, which, on one hand, you
Speaker 1: have the Dan O'Bannon connection there, he's one of the
Speaker 1: screenwriters and one of the very instrumental in Alien obviously,
Speaker 1: but also Dark Star has this blue collar like space
Speaker 1: trucker feel to it, you know, something that is very
Speaker 1: much an essential part of the DNA of Alien, you know,
Speaker 1: because if you take out the creature and the setting
Speaker 1: is still a vital aspect of that picture.
Speaker 3: I've said this on the show before, but I have
Speaker 3: a theory that Alien is one of the best movies
Speaker 3: ever made about work, and that's kind of what makes
Speaker 3: it unique and interesting and realistic. The characters in Alien
Speaker 3: are not friends. They know each other reasonably well, not
Speaker 3: super well. They're not close, and the kind of relationship
Speaker 3: they have is the kind of relationship often have with
Speaker 3: like co workers. It's like, you know, you got to
Speaker 3: get along to get the work done, but you don't
Speaker 3: even you know, you might or might not like each other,
Speaker 3: You might or not, you know, have all these conflicts.
Speaker 3: So it's not just a movie that features blue collar workers,
Speaker 3: but is itself about work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think that's a solid point. There are
Speaker 1: some other films that are often thrown out as being
Speaker 1: like predecessors to Alien, nineteen fifty eight's hit The Tear
Speaker 1: from Beyond Space, which I haven't seen. I was looking
Speaker 1: at it the other day, but that's one that the
Speaker 1: director of this picture points out as being one of
Speaker 1: his inspirations. I think there's some obvious inspiration here from
Speaker 1: Planet of the Vampires, but again, I think Creature is
Speaker 1: ultimately one of the more entertaining and also, as i'll
Speaker 1: discuss tasteful alien knockoffs that has come.
Speaker 3: Out, Yeah, I know what you're saying. Some of the
Speaker 3: Alien knockoffs from the eighties, which I have seen and
Speaker 3: have in parts, some of them just get kind of
Speaker 3: gross with like the you know, the weird sort of
Speaker 3: implied sexuality of Alien is realized in a nastier way
Speaker 3: in a lot of these copycats.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because I mean, you can't take if topics and
Speaker 1: ideas of sexuality and reproduction out of Alien. It's very
Speaker 1: much part of the DNA, It's very much a part
Speaker 1: of hr Giger's visual surrealism that informs so many aspects
Speaker 1: of the film. But yeah, you'll look at various Alien
Speaker 1: knockoffs like the Corman produced Galaxy of Terror and the
Speaker 1: British and Seminoid, both from nineteen eighty one, and these
Speaker 1: are both examples of films that they end up just
Speaker 1: coming off sleazy and exploitive in my opinion, because they
Speaker 1: don't deal with these things with the nuance and that
Speaker 1: kind of almost subliminal energy that Alien does so well. Now,
Speaker 1: another thing to keep in mind about Creature here is that, Okay,
Speaker 1: Alien was of course a world class production. I think
Speaker 1: I had a budget of eleven million dollars. This is
Speaker 1: late seventies money. It had helming it one of the
Speaker 1: most visually visionary directors you know of our time, and
Speaker 1: on top of that, you know the work of hr
Speaker 1: Giger and so forth. Creature, however, was made for less
Speaker 1: than half of this amount of reported four point two
Speaker 1: million dollars, and it's a pretty ambitious project for what
Speaker 1: was reportedly even half that in budget on at the outset,
Speaker 1: because you end up having multiple sci fi sets, like,
Speaker 1: you know, over a dozen different sets, including spaceship interiors,
Speaker 1: alien planets. You've got spaceship models, planetary surface models, various
Speaker 1: special effects, and ultimately a respectable cast. You know, this
Speaker 1: is not one of those casts where everybody's green and
Speaker 1: acting like they just fell out of the back of
Speaker 1: the truck or something. It's ultimately, I think, pretty commendable
Speaker 1: what there is able to do when you remind yourself
Speaker 1: that this was low budget that was shot in a
Speaker 1: warehouse during like a super hot summer where they're just
Speaker 1: they're just totally unable to cool things down enough and
Speaker 1: having to deal with everyone's sweating in their big spacesuits.
Speaker 1: You know, I think it comes together pretty well when
Speaker 1: you take all that into account.
Speaker 3: Oh, I wonder if they sort of improvised a way
Speaker 3: of writing that into the script, because there's a whole
Speaker 3: subplot in the middle of the movie where a couple
Speaker 3: of characters are able to figure out that another character
Speaker 3: is is is brain slugged and tricking them because they're
Speaker 3: sweating in this hot ship and he's not.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I bet so, because yeah, there are all
Speaker 1: these behind the scenes tidbits about just how hot it was,
Speaker 1: and it was they were sweating and it was like
Speaker 1: steaming up the insides of the helmets. So yeah, it
Speaker 1: sounds like it was a grueling but most of the
Speaker 1: accounts seemed to say it was.
Speaker 3: You know, it's a pretty.
Speaker 1: Pretty fun shoot for the most part, with some some
Speaker 1: key caveats that we'll come back to. All right, Joe,
Speaker 1: what's your elevator pitch for creature?
Speaker 3: Oh, let's see how to create the perfect organism. Get
Speaker 3: a little bit of your alien, a little bit of
Speaker 3: your the thing, and a little bit of your the
Speaker 3: brain eaters, and put them all into blender, and here's
Speaker 3: what you got.
Speaker 1: I want to say that there's a little bit of
Speaker 1: dinosaur costume to this guy as well, especially while you're
Speaker 1: in this in the film, when you see him more
Speaker 1: of a full body shot, there's kind of like a
Speaker 1: big rubber dinosaur costume sense to him.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Again, it's an unenviable task to try to create something
Speaker 1: that is alien esque but on a budget and without
Speaker 1: a visionary artist behind its design.
Speaker 3: Now, I think it would be impossible to deny that
Speaker 3: this movie is derivative of Alien in many ways. But
Speaker 3: one thing I think is kind of surprising about it
Speaker 3: is that it also feels derivative of Aliens, and yet
Speaker 3: it's not because came before Aliens. So there are several
Speaker 3: things in it where I was like, oh, this is
Speaker 3: this is taking this thing from you know, the camera
Speaker 3: and movie, but actually it wasn't out yet, so this
Speaker 3: came first. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There's also stuff in here that reminds me a little
Speaker 1: bit of things we would later see in Prometheus, with
Speaker 1: Prometheus reaching back and drawing from things like Planet of
Speaker 1: the Vampires, but like we have the scene with like
Speaker 1: the Black Ooze we'll talk about and yeah, and then
Speaker 1: like the space zombies are abominations. So so yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a really fun one I think to watch as an
Speaker 1: alien fan, and again, it avoids, I think most of
Speaker 1: the pitfalls of lewdness that you encounter with some of
Speaker 1: these other alien knockoffs. All right, let's go ahead and
Speaker 1: listen to that trailer audio.
Speaker 4: In the near future, in the shadow of Saturn's rings,
Speaker 4: stranded beneath the surface of the barren moon called Titan
Speaker 4: scientists find the one thing they never expected. It is
Speaker 4: anybody here was expecting them God, And suddenly those who
Speaker 4: had traveled across the galaxy had one out of space. Creature.
Speaker 4: It kills to live, and it lives to kill.
Speaker 3: All right.
Speaker 1: So at this point, if you were thinking to yourself,
Speaker 1: well I would like to see Creature, I haven't seen it,
Speaker 1: or I would like to see it again before continuing
Speaker 1: on with this episode, well, Luckily, Creature has been available
Speaker 1: in various home video formats for quite a while, but
Speaker 1: in my opinion, the twenty twenty two release from Vine
Speaker 1: or Syndrome the Blu ray is definitely the way to
Speaker 1: go for physical media on this one. I rented it
Speaker 1: from Atlanta's Videodrome. It's got some cool extra features. It
Speaker 1: has the original Titan Find cut of the film, which
Speaker 1: is a bit darker compared to the main theatrical cut
Speaker 1: that you have on the disc, but still interesting to
Speaker 1: check out. You can also stream Creature digitally on multiple platforms,
Speaker 1: and there are multiple digital rental and purchase options as well.
Speaker 3: I'm in a weird situation that I watched the first
Speaker 3: half of the movie as the Titan Find cut and
Speaker 3: the second half in the theatrical cut, so I don't
Speaker 3: know what the difference is.
Speaker 1: Did you notice any changes in lighting, because I really
Speaker 1: didn't look at the Titan Find one much, so I
Speaker 1: can't speak to it.
Speaker 3: You mean, not darker in terms of tone, but darker visually, Yes,
Speaker 3: the Titan Find cut is very dark. In fact, we
Speaker 3: were talking off Mike about how one of my main
Speaker 3: complaints about the movie is that you can't see the
Speaker 3: sets at all. The characters are just standing around in
Speaker 3: darkness talking, so I can't even tell if the sets
Speaker 3: are good or not. In the theatrical cut, yeah, it
Speaker 3: was a little It did seem a little bit more illuminated,
Speaker 3: a little bit brighter, but still you couldn't see a
Speaker 3: lot of the sets on the planet.
Speaker 1: Now, speaking of physical media, I want to give a
Speaker 1: shout out to Future Shock Video in New Orleans. This
Speaker 1: is a new video rental store that we just read
Speaker 1: about in New Orleans Magazine. It's operated by Eden Chubb,
Speaker 1: who was apparently partially inspired by Weird House Cinema and
Speaker 1: certainly inspired by Atlanta's own video rental store, Videodrome. The
Speaker 1: name of the store is also a nod to the
Speaker 1: concept of Future Shock, which we've discussed on the show,
Speaker 1: So kudos to Eden for keeping the physical media circulating.
Speaker 1: You can learn more about Future Shock Video at futureshockvideo
Speaker 1: dot biz and you can follow the store on Instagram
Speaker 1: at future Shock Video. All right, Well, let's get into
Speaker 1: the people who made this film, all right. Starting at
Speaker 1: the top, director, writer, producer, it's William Malone born nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty three, UCLA Film School grad, writer and director who
Speaker 1: started out in acting and some special effects work, but then,
Speaker 1: in the wake of nineteen seventy nine's Alien, which he
Speaker 1: was inspired by, he was able to raise a reported
Speaker 1: seventy four thousand dollars to make the film Scared to Death,
Speaker 1: in which a Giger esque creature runs amok in the
Speaker 1: La sewer system. I haven't seen this one, so I
Speaker 1: can't really speak to it, but I looked at a
Speaker 1: couple of stills in the Monster Man.
Speaker 3: This must have been a really precious project to him,
Speaker 3: because he works. I don't know if you caught onto
Speaker 3: this rob how many references too Scared to Death he
Speaker 3: works into creature. Did you notice these?
Speaker 1: I didn't notice them so much for your pointing out
Speaker 1: some of them, and I guess you'll point them out
Speaker 1: as we go here. Yeah, maybe they're supposed to be
Speaker 1: the same cinematic universe.
Speaker 3: Oh I didn't consider that. Well, but I don't know
Speaker 3: if that would work, because one character is reading the
Speaker 3: novelization of Scared to Death.
Speaker 1: All right, So this film Creature, which was originally he
Speaker 1: talks about this on the extras it was originally in
Speaker 1: It originally had the working title Titan Fined, which the
Speaker 1: producers did not like the other like the main money
Speaker 1: behind it. They were like, it sounds too much like
Speaker 1: tight and fine. People are going to think it's something else,
Speaker 1: which seems like it's a little reaching there.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 1: I didn't think about that connotation. I think Titan Fine
Speaker 1: sounds rather fascinating and very sci fi.
Speaker 3: It makes me think maybe they were thinking it sounds
Speaker 3: too intellectual and they were coming up with an excuse
Speaker 3: for why they wanted to just call it monster.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but anyway, this was the follow up. He mentions
Speaker 1: some of those extras that he was always terrible at
Speaker 1: writing to meet a particular budget, and that was very
Speaker 1: much the case here. It was apparently a real struggle
Speaker 1: to go after everything they needed to make creature, and
Speaker 1: at one point in the production, one of the producers
Speaker 1: I think this is mush Diamont Diamant, It could be wrong,
Speaker 1: but he comes in and says, oh, you guys need
Speaker 1: more money for what you're trying to do here, and
Speaker 1: essentially double their budget at that point, which Malone says
Speaker 1: was of course it was a lifeline, but also it
Speaker 1: was a bit frustrating at that stage in the production
Speaker 1: because they were already a certain way into making everything
Speaker 1: based on what you had, and suddenly you have additional resources,
Speaker 1: which and you can't really redo what you've done already.
Speaker 1: You have to think of outther other ways to make
Speaker 1: use of those funds.
Speaker 3: I feel like we have talked about more examples of
Speaker 3: it going the other way, where you start making a
Speaker 3: movie and then the budget gets cut. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So, I mean one of the things they ended up
Speaker 1: doing when more money came in on this one is
Speaker 1: hired klas Kinsky, which we'll get in, which I don't
Speaker 1: think is always I would go so far as to say,
Speaker 1: is maybe never a good use of extra money in
Speaker 1: your film to say, well, let's bring in noted nightmare
Speaker 1: klaus Kinsky. That's gonna be great for the film and
Speaker 1: great for morale.
Speaker 3: Oh, we just got a bunch of extra money. We
Speaker 3: can use that to rent a jar of red back
Speaker 3: spiders and release them onto the set.
Speaker 1: Essentially.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it really spiced things up.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, I mean it's gonna make people more excited
Speaker 1: in front of the camera.
Speaker 3: Let's do it. Well.
Speaker 1: More on that in a bit, but both Scared to
Speaker 1: Death and Creature were apparently successful. Creature was a theatrical release,
Speaker 1: and Malone followed the film up with some TV projects.
Speaker 1: He directed three episodes of Freddy's Nightmares, and he also
Speaker 1: directed two episodes of Tales from the Crypt, one of
Speaker 1: which he also wrote. He also did one episode of
Speaker 1: the short lived sci fi spinoff of Tales from the Crypt,
Speaker 1: Perversions of Science, and after some additional TV projects, he
Speaker 1: directed the big budget remake of House on Haunted Hill
Speaker 1: in nineth.
Speaker 3: I know you remember this one, Joe. I mean, I
Speaker 3: don't think there's any way to make the case that
Speaker 3: it's good, but it's very watchably bad. It has a
Speaker 3: great cast, kind of star studded, you know, a lot
Speaker 3: of great character actors running around doing ridiculous things. I
Speaker 3: remember it being really ugly, like a movie that's quite
Speaker 3: hard on the eyes, but it's I had a great time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember Jeffrey Combs has a fun, uh I think,
Speaker 1: non speaking role in it, and then Jeffrey Rush basically
Speaker 1: plays Vincent Price in the film, like, in fact, the
Speaker 1: character's name is Stephen Price, and that is as fun
Speaker 1: as it sounds, you know, just letting Rush go wild
Speaker 1: for the duration of the film as Vincent Price.
Speaker 3: Just trying to remember who else is in it. I
Speaker 3: looked at up. It's got Tay Diggs, Chris Catan, fam
Speaker 3: Kid Janssen, It's oh Man.
Speaker 1: When Tay Diggs was in a lot of different movies.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Anyway back to Malone. His only two films after that
Speaker 1: were two thousand and two is Fear dot Com, which
Speaker 1: I remember is being quite awful, speaking of.
Speaker 3: Ugly movies that are hard on the eyes, that we're
Speaker 3: right in that zone around the turn of the millennium
Speaker 3: where movies it seems we're just the color palette and
Speaker 3: the brightness level and everything was optimized to hurt the
Speaker 3: eyes to watch.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like, I mean, I don't even want to throw
Speaker 1: too much shade at Malone for Fear dot Com because
Speaker 1: Fear dot com was exactly the sort of movie that
Speaker 1: the Year two thousand and two wanted, And even though
Speaker 1: I do not like it, there are a number. There
Speaker 1: aren't a lot of films from two thousand and two.
Speaker 1: I'm exactly going back and feeling nostalgic for He did
Speaker 1: one more film in two thousand and eight, and he
Speaker 1: also directed one episode of two thousand and six's Masters
Speaker 1: of Horror, The Fair Haired Child. As a writer, he
Speaker 1: also worked on nineteen ninety nine's Universal Universal Soldier The
Speaker 1: Return and the Year two thousand movies Supernova. Now there's
Speaker 1: another right that is credited one Alan Reid, but I
Speaker 1: couldn't find much about them. This is not to be
Speaker 1: confused with the original voice of Freddie Flintstone, different Alan Reid,
Speaker 1: but I could not figure out exactly who this individual is.
Speaker 3: Sorry, this is completely out of order, but I just
Speaker 3: remembered another actor in his house on Haunted Hill, and
Speaker 3: it's that there's a cameo where Lisa Loebe plays a
Speaker 3: TV reporter. What, yeah, why, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm good for her, all right. Moving on to the
Speaker 1: actors in this film. This is of course an alien
Speaker 1: asque picture, so we have a crew and if you
Speaker 1: have a crew, you got to have a captain. And
Speaker 1: our captain is Captain Mike Davison played by Stan Ivar
Speaker 1: born nineteen forty three. Not only is is he our
Speaker 1: captain in this film, he was also he's also a
Speaker 1: future actual ship captain according to Malone, So he chalks
Speaker 1: that up to good casting, like he saw this guy
Speaker 1: and realized this dude can command a ship.
Speaker 3: I mean, he is believable as a ship captain. I
Speaker 3: will say that no offense to Stan. I don't have
Speaker 3: a lot to say about his performance here. It's sort
Speaker 3: of a It's like a slice of white toast with
Speaker 3: no butter or jam. There's nothing wrong with it, nothing
Speaker 3: to offend. But also it's very plain.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's fitting that at this point in his career,
Speaker 1: mostly a TV actor, he had just played John Carter
Speaker 1: on Little House on the Prairie, along with some other
Speaker 1: various guest show spots guest spots on shows. But you know,
Speaker 1: he is the kind of actor he can easily imagine
Speaker 1: doing a lot of scenes where he's just coming back
Speaker 1: from some farm work and he needs a nice drink
Speaker 1: of water back at the Little House on the Prairie. Anyway,
Speaker 1: This sort of work would would continue, with him doing
Speaker 1: a lot of one shots on popular TV series of
Speaker 1: the eighties and nineties. His latter film credits include roles
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety one's Harley Davidson and the Marlborough Man
Speaker 1: and nineteen ninety three's Aspen Extreme. His last credits were
Speaker 1: a pair of NCIS episodes in twenty ten. But yeah,
Speaker 1: he's he's solid in this, you know, like you said,
Speaker 1: he's he does a solid job. No notes, really, but
Speaker 1: you know, he's no Tom Scarett, but he is maybe
Speaker 1: Tom Scarett esque.
Speaker 3: I think they were clearly going for a Tom Scarett type.
Speaker 3: They wanted to replicate Dallas as a relatively soft spoken, stoic,
Speaker 3: strong masculine captain, and he sort of gets there, but
Speaker 3: he doesn't really have Tom Skarett's quiet charisma.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right. Now, he does have a girlfriend on
Speaker 1: the crew though. You know that's of course, one of
Speaker 1: the very notable things about Alien is there are no
Speaker 1: romantic entanglements. Yeah, but that's not the case here because
Speaker 1: his girlfriend is also a crew member. And this is
Speaker 1: the character Bet Slayton, played by Wendy Shaw.
Speaker 3: You know, Shaw is an interesting presence in this film.
Speaker 3: I think she is just very likable and very grounded.
Speaker 3: She feels like a real person. For the most part,
Speaker 3: her portrayal of this character is strong in its understatedness,
Speaker 3: you know, like she she plays the character as kind
Speaker 3: of quiet and not super expressive, but that works well.
Speaker 3: But she does have a couple of unintentionally funny moments.
Speaker 3: For example, do you remember the part where she's telling
Speaker 3: the story of Hofner the of you know, Klauskinsky trying
Speaker 3: to kill her, And in the scene, I could just
Speaker 3: imagine the director behind the camera gesturing at her to
Speaker 3: display more emotion, you know, like, come on, make it bigger, bigger,
Speaker 3: And so she does, and it comes off very forced
Speaker 3: in a funny way. Also, at least at least three
Speaker 3: or four times, maybe more in the movie, she says
Speaker 3: another character's name wrong. She says Davidson instead of Davison,
Speaker 3: which you might think is simply realistic. Oh maybe people,
Speaker 3: you know, people get people's names wrong, Except Davison is
Speaker 3: supposed to be her boyfriend, and she's calling him by
Speaker 3: his last name.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's his middle name. We don't know his full name.
Speaker 3: He you know, maybe, oh, maybe that's her like cutesy
Speaker 3: nickname for him. Yeah, it's an inside joke, but on
Speaker 3: the whole, as I was saying, Shall is quite good
Speaker 3: in this character and very likable. She brings a kind
Speaker 3: of human energy to the character, and I think without
Speaker 3: her we would not have a lot of reason to
Speaker 3: care about the humans.
Speaker 1: I agree, especially when you whittle it down to what
Speaker 1: we're left with towards the end of the picture, because
Speaker 1: that's always telling which characters have you chosen to sacrifice,
Speaker 1: in which characters are going to land the plane or
Speaker 1: the spaceship in this case.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Shall born nineteen fifty four was a pretty season
Speaker 1: TV actor by this point. I think it shows, having
Speaker 1: popped up on various late seventies and early eighties network series.
Speaker 1: She'd continue to work in TV, and her latter film
Speaker 1: credits include. Film and TV credits include the likes of
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty seven's The Munchies, This is a Gromlins movie
Speaker 1: that I haven't seen, but we're not going to stop there.
Speaker 1: It gets better, eighty seven's Innerspace Batteries not included from
Speaker 1: the same year, nineteen eighty nine's The Birds, and such
Speaker 1: TV series as The X Files, six feet Under and
Speaker 1: star Trek Voyager. She's also done a lot of voice
Speaker 1: acting for the Family Guy and American Dad animated series.
Speaker 3: I just had to check to make sure, but yes,
Speaker 3: Munchies is the Roger Corman produced, a Grimlins ripoff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it does not look good. I haven't seen it.
Speaker 1: It may be great.
Speaker 3: I don't know. I haven't seen it.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 3: I mentioned earlier that there were some elements of this
Speaker 3: movie that I first mistakenly thought were lifted out of Aliens,
Speaker 3: and then realized, oh no, this movie came out before Aliens,
Speaker 3: and one of them is the next character we're about
Speaker 3: to talk about, played by lyman Ward. This is the
Speaker 3: Burke character, except he comes before Burke.
Speaker 1: That's right, Yeah, lyman Ward plays David Perkins. Ward was
Speaker 1: born nineteen forty one Canadian actor, character actor, most famous
Speaker 1: for playing Ferris Bueller's dad in nineteen eighty six, but
Speaker 1: he you also might recognize him from other things. He
Speaker 1: pops up in the likes of Independence Day in ninety six.
Speaker 1: He's in a nine rand m Street Part two. He's
Speaker 1: done a lot of TV and film work over the decades,
Speaker 1: going back to seventy one, and he's apparently still active
Speaker 1: His other credits include seventy three's Coffee, eighty four's Moscow
Speaker 1: on the Hudson, eighty seven's Planes, Trains and Automobiles, and
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety two Sleepwalkers.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So, I think lyman Ward brings a kind of
Speaker 3: and I don't necessarily mean this in a bad way,
Speaker 3: a kind of welcome cheesiness that is in some ways
Speaker 3: inseparable from his recognizability as a minor eighties character actor.
Speaker 3: I would put him almost in the klue Goolager zone,
Speaker 3: if you know what I'm saying. Yeah, I think that's fair. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and it makes it more surprising and enjoyable. In fact,
Speaker 3: when he starts like making brain slug zombie heads explode, that's.
Speaker 1: A great scene. I can't wait to talk about that one. Also,
Speaker 1: of note, he's interviewed in some of the extras on
Speaker 1: the Vinegar Syndrome disc and he's one of these individuals
Speaker 1: who says that he got along fine with Kinsky on
Speaker 1: the set and went out to lunch with him a
Speaker 1: couple of times. And I don't mention that as in
Speaker 1: any way an attempt to redeem Kinsky, who, as will discuss,
Speaker 1: I think most agree was an out of control Monster.
Speaker 1: But it is interesting how seemingly there were folks that
Speaker 1: he worked with who didn't have absolute nightmares around him,
Speaker 1: And I wonder how much of that had to do
Speaker 1: with like, to what degree Kinsky felt threatened by someone
Speaker 1: like seems like the kind of guy who's going to
Speaker 1: be very threatened by anybody that is in a position
Speaker 1: of power over him, like a director or a producer,
Speaker 1: or seemingly you know, female members of a cast, but
Speaker 1: here is just a male co star, perhaps one of
Speaker 1: the Perhaps this is one of those moments where you
Speaker 1: actually end up getting something a little more balanced out
Speaker 1: of Kinski because he's not threatened by you, his you know,
Speaker 1: his narcissistic view of himself, not feel in danger around
Speaker 1: this person. I don't know, anyway, food for thought. Moving on,
Speaker 1: we also have Robert Jeffy playing John Finnell born nineteen
Speaker 1: forty nine. Handsome young actor coming off of small roles
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy two, including The Mechanic, but by this
Speaker 1: point he largely moved more into the production and writing
Speaker 1: side of things. He was one of the screenwriters on
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven's Demon Seed, the out of control AI
Speaker 1: movie based on the novel by Dean Coots, and he
Speaker 1: was also a screenwriter on nineteen eighty's Motel Hell, which
Speaker 1: he also produced and notable to the subgenre of space horror.
Speaker 1: At some point, it looks like Jeffy acquired the rights
Speaker 1: to George R. R. Martin's novella Nightflyers. He produced and wrote
Speaker 1: an adaptation of that in nineteen eighty seven, though I
Speaker 1: believe it's based more on Martin's original short story version
Speaker 1: of that tale, and he was again listed as a
Speaker 1: producer on the twenty seventeen TV minise He's adaptation. I've
Speaker 1: only seen parts of the eighty seven adaptation, and it
Speaker 1: looks really goofy and fun. I've seen the entirety of
Speaker 1: the twenty seventeen mini series, which has a great cast,
Speaker 1: looks phenomenal, but honestly kind of bored me to death
Speaker 1: after a while.
Speaker 3: Well, I've never seen the eighty seven movie, but I've
Speaker 3: wanted to for a while so that we may come
Speaker 3: back to that on Weird House. But I will say,
Speaker 3: as far as just his acting performance here, along with
Speaker 3: Wendy Shall, I think Jaffee is the other most sympathetic
Speaker 3: and realistic performance among the crew. He brings a kind
Speaker 3: of relaxed humanity that makes it all the more alarming
Speaker 3: when he starts trying to brain leach people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was kind of surprising that this is a
Speaker 1: guy who seemingly was, I'm assuming here making a lot
Speaker 1: of assumptions, but was drawn more towards the behind the
Speaker 1: scenes stuff as opposed to staying in front of the camera.
Speaker 3: Because he's great in front of the camera. Yeah, he is,
Speaker 3: all right.
Speaker 1: We also have a character by the name of Melanie
Speaker 1: Bryce who She is the security officer that's brought in
Speaker 1: on this, which is also kind of kind of something.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is obviously in Aliens, Like the whole
Speaker 1: plot revolves around, well, this is a problem. Let's bring
Speaker 1: in some muscle. Let's bring in the Colonial Marines. That's
Speaker 1: kind of her purpose here. They're like, we think there's
Speaker 1: going to be something Xena Morphy going on. We better
Speaker 1: bring in some tall, mysterious woman who doesn't talk and
Speaker 1: has a big gun. Bryce here is played by Diane
Speaker 1: Salinger born nineteen fifty one, tall, striking American actor who
Speaker 1: prior to this had apparently done some stage work in
Speaker 1: New York and then moved out to la At the
Speaker 1: behest of her agent. But this wasn't her only nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty five film. She also appeared in Tim Burton's Peewee's
Speaker 1: Big Adventure, playing Simone, a waitress that dreams of visiting France.
Speaker 1: After this, she'd remained friends with Paul Rubens, and Tim
Speaker 1: Burton directed her again as the Penguin's Mother, alongside Paul
Speaker 1: Rubens playing the Penguin's father in nineteen ninety two's Batman Returns.
Speaker 3: Oh Yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 1: She's done a lot of TV and film work over
Speaker 1: the years, including such titles as ninety one's The Butcher's Wife,
Speaker 1: ninety five's The Scarlet Letter, two thousand and one's Ghost World.
Speaker 1: I believe she plays a psychiatrist in that. She has
Speaker 1: a recurring role in HBO's Carnival, and she also did
Speaker 1: a couple of Star Trek Deep Space nine episodes.
Speaker 3: I want to say that there are some very weird
Speaker 3: things about her characterization here, but I think that's not
Speaker 3: her fault. It's like the character is written very oddly,
Speaker 3: that there's a complete mismatch between the ways she's portrayed
Speaker 3: in different scenes, and then when you get to the
Speaker 3: later way she's portrayed, it doesn't make any sense why
Speaker 3: they had her portrayed a different way earlier on. But
Speaker 3: doing what she can with what she has to work
Speaker 3: with in the script, I think she's good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, added caveat. This was her first film.
Speaker 1: She has great energy and a unique look. I checked
Speaker 1: out some various behind the scenes interviews that she did
Speaker 1: about this and other films, and she's a real like
Speaker 1: full of personality and insight. And we'll get back to
Speaker 1: some of that in a bit. All right, we have
Speaker 1: a let's see that we have a doctor on the crew.
Speaker 1: This is doctor Wendy h Oliver played by Annette McCarthy
Speaker 1: who lived nineteen fifty eight through twenty twenty three. Mostly
Speaker 1: a TV actor with credits that include Twin Peaks. She
Speaker 1: played Evelyn Marsh on that and she also appeared on Baywatch.
Speaker 3: Yeah, her presence in the movie is more minor. There
Speaker 3: is one funny moment I don't know if it's supposed
Speaker 3: to be funny where she's being lured off to a
Speaker 3: dark room by a brain slug possessed Robert Jaffe and
Speaker 3: she starts talking about how she's not a real doctor
Speaker 3: and he's like, oh, I have a secret too. Anyways,
Speaker 3: let's go into this room.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was interesting, and the character development went nowhere
Speaker 1: because she's like killed the next scene, but it also
Speaker 1: was kind of a funny moment. And then we have
Speaker 1: the character Susan Delambrey played by Marie Lauren. Her birth
Speaker 1: date's not public record, but she's in a number of
Speaker 1: the making of a bits the disc as well. Energetic
Speaker 1: American actor with a really solid supporting role.
Speaker 3: In this film.
Speaker 1: I think, you know, like she's a doomed character, but
Speaker 1: she gets to do more than just be doomed, if
Speaker 1: that makes sense. At this point in her career, she'd
Speaker 1: appeared in various TV series, and she went on to
Speaker 1: act in David Lynch's nineteen eighty eight short film The
Speaker 1: Cowboy and the Frenchman, and she's been active in recent
Speaker 1: years as a writer and producer on such films as
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three is the Uncanny, in which she also stars.
Speaker 3: Okay, she has a different energy than any other character
Speaker 3: in this movie, and that she almost feels like out
Speaker 3: of a story involving magic. She has prophetic visions of
Speaker 3: the fact that she's going to die, which it doesn't
Speaker 3: really fit with the story. Otherwise there's no other inkling
Speaker 3: of like magic or psychic powers, and she just happens
Speaker 3: to know that they're doomed and she's going to die.
Speaker 3: And she also kind of wanders around with a dreamlike,
Speaker 3: almost fairy like kind of spirit.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: According to the extras on the disk, she was the
Speaker 1: one who came to the director and said, all right,
Speaker 1: this pivotal scene where my character seemingly comes back from
Speaker 1: the dead and lures another character of their death, I
Speaker 1: need to be nude for this. And he was like, okay,
Speaker 1: let's do.
Speaker 3: It on the planet's surface, the surface of Titan. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But I think the nudity does add to the creepiness
Speaker 1: of the sequence because it makes it even more of
Speaker 1: an obvious delusion and ultimately is like, I think one
Speaker 1: of the creepier sequences in the picture.
Speaker 3: She has multiple of the creepiest moments in the movie.
Speaker 3: There's that. There's also a scene later on where she's
Speaker 3: in a spacesuit and the characters come across her and
Speaker 3: they think that she is dead, but she suddenly like
Speaker 3: grins and all this blood bursts out of her mouth
Speaker 3: as she sort of like pops awake and smiles. It's gross.
Speaker 1: All right, And then of course we have Kloskinski playing
Speaker 1: the character Hans Rudy Hofner, which of course is an
Speaker 1: obvious nod to Alien designer HRG or Hans Rudi Gieger.
Speaker 3: There's a lot I could say about this performance. I'll
Speaker 3: maybe save some of it for when we talk about
Speaker 3: the plot. But also this character feels completely superfluous to
Speaker 3: the story, like it's just sort of copy pasted in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, apparently it's very much the case that they got
Speaker 1: the extra money they realized they could cast clost Kinski
Speaker 1: if they could get in touch with him. According to Malone,
Speaker 1: the only way to get in touch with Kinsky at
Speaker 1: the time was to send a telegram, and he was
Speaker 1: reportedly living in like a shack somewhere up in the
Speaker 1: California mountains, and he slept on straw on the floor,
Speaker 1: and they were somehow able to get in touch with
Speaker 1: him and cast him here. But then, of course, as
Speaker 1: one would expect, especially at this point in his career,
Speaker 1: he was a nightmare. You know. The thing about Kinski
Speaker 1: is that he's famous. He's infamous for being not only
Speaker 1: this ball of crazed intensity that can be captivating on
Speaker 1: the screen, but also being almost impossible, not just almost
Speaker 1: universally impossible to work with, Like, there's so many accounts
Speaker 1: of him being either insanely difficult or being just a
Speaker 1: loathsome human being, sometimes both, often both, you can get
Speaker 1: both from him. And so we've talked about him a
Speaker 1: little bit on Weird House Cinema before he was in
Speaker 1: the killer snake movie Venom in nineteen eighty one. I
Speaker 1: would guess he achieved his most notable work in the
Speaker 1: films of legendary director Werner Herzog, who seems to have
Speaker 1: been one of the very few directors capable of managing
Speaker 1: him to some degree.
Speaker 3: Yeah, by whatever means necessary.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Now, on this production, he notably harassed Diane Salinger
Speaker 1: on the set. Totally unacceptable. Would not fly it all today, obviously,
Speaker 1: but in interviews she has reflected on this, and she's
Speaker 1: talked about how she really had to check his bs
Speaker 1: and put him in his place at one point. So
Speaker 1: she's very tall, Kinski was a short man. At one point.
Speaker 1: She says she had to like pick him up in
Speaker 1: a bear hug and just kind of like shake him
Speaker 1: and in doing so like largely put him in his place.
Speaker 1: So I get that after a while she did not
Speaker 1: have to worry about Kinsky, but you know, he was
Speaker 1: awful on the set and she had to to put.
Speaker 3: Him in his place.
Speaker 1: But she reflects on some of this in the twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one documentary Creation Is Violent, anecdotes on Kinsky's final years.
Speaker 1: She also talks a little bit on the vinegar syndrome
Speaker 1: disc She points out that Kinsky did some brilliant takes
Speaker 1: for Creature, but they couldn't use a lot of them
Speaker 1: because he just refused to hit his mark, so he
Speaker 1: was often out of focus. You know, he was very
Speaker 1: much not going to listen to any director or a
Speaker 1: cameraman or anything, and so they ended up losing a
Speaker 1: lot of footage. So what you see is to a
Speaker 1: certain extent, what they could actually use, like is he
Speaker 1: in is he?
Speaker 3: Is he? Is he blurry?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 3: Okay?
Speaker 1: Is he eating a sandwich? Well, yes, I guess we'll
Speaker 1: use it.
Speaker 3: That would explain it. Is he eating a sandwich? And
Speaker 3: it almost sounds like he's making up his lines while
Speaker 3: he choose Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, because I'm assuming he's probably gonna largely
Speaker 1: say whatever he wants either, So just an unenviable position
Speaker 1: to imagine anyone trying to direct this man and something.
Speaker 1: Even if you might get those moments of brilliance on
Speaker 1: camera where you know, you get that like that raw,
Speaker 1: crackling kinsky intensity, but what what are you willing to
Speaker 1: sacrifice for yourself or for the cast in order to
Speaker 1: get there? All right? The music on this one the
Speaker 1: scores by Thomas Chase and Steve Rucker, both born nineteen
Speaker 1: forty nine. These guys went on to work extensively on
Speaker 1: animated series including Scooby Doo, Powerpuff Girls, and various other projects.
Speaker 1: Looks like maybe some various other Cartoon Network related projects.
Speaker 3: I think the score here feels almost consciously like an
Speaker 3: attempt to reproduce the score of Alien. Yes, there are
Speaker 3: even similar dynamics where like there's kind of a swelling
Speaker 3: of the orchestra, but then it dies away and then
Speaker 3: there's a single high melody line that's carried by a
Speaker 3: woodwind like a clarinet or an obo, just like you
Speaker 3: get in some of the Alien music. It's it's it
Speaker 3: feels familiar. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, as far as the effects go, the main team
Speaker 1: here was the La Effects Group INK, which among others,
Speaker 1: included Suzanne M. Benson who had gone to work on
Speaker 1: Aliens the following year and win an Oscar for it.
Speaker 1: In fact, Benson was the first woman apparently to win
Speaker 1: an Oscar for special effects work. Michael McCracken is credited
Speaker 1: with the initial design of the Titan find creature or
Speaker 1: monster in this He also worked on nineteen eighty nine's Leviathan.
Speaker 3: Special effects in this movie are fun. They are. I
Speaker 3: would say they are mixed in terms of quality. You
Speaker 3: can tell there were some budget limitations at some points,
Speaker 3: but almost all of the effects shots are fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, obvious limitations, but yeah, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: fun stuff in here, and sometimes it's hilarious, you know.
Speaker 1: You know, great effects team is only going to go
Speaker 1: so far when you're up against those budgetary constraints and
Speaker 1: you're working in this super hot warehouse in the heat
Speaker 1: of the summer in California. All right, well, let's jump
Speaker 1: into the plot here. Let's go into space and see
Speaker 1: if anyone can hear a screen.
Speaker 3: Okay, Well, the first thing we get is intense music,
Speaker 3: minor chords, pounding, hollow drums, kind of a sweeping Doppler
Speaker 3: sound of symbols. Once again, I will say quite reminiscent
Speaker 3: of the Jerry Goldsmith score in Alien. And then we
Speaker 3: get some text telling us about the setting. So we
Speaker 3: are told, in the competition for new materials and advanced
Speaker 3: manufacturing techniques, two multinational corporations have invested heavily in space.
Speaker 3: The rival firms of Rick Dynamics of West Germany and
Speaker 3: NTI of the USA are locked in a fierce race
Speaker 3: for commercial supremacy. So first of all, we can note
Speaker 3: that space is being colonized for business purposes, but Germany
Speaker 3: is still divided here. And then also this will, despite
Speaker 3: how much attention they give it by including a text
Speaker 3: legend right here at the top, this will play remarkably
Speaker 3: little role in the plot. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's some nice background color that does feel very
Speaker 1: much in keeping with the Alien universe, you know, with
Speaker 1: the corporations like Wailand, Tutani. But yeah, it's not particularly necessary.
Speaker 3: So next week to Chiron saying that we are on Titan,
Speaker 3: which is Saturn's largest moon, on following a geological research
Speaker 3: team from NTI. And we're also told that it's April fifth,
Speaker 3: But is it April fifth on Earth or on Titan?
Speaker 3: So I don't know if there would be in April
Speaker 3: on Titan. Somewhere somewhere here on Titan. There's an opening
Speaker 3: scene where there are a couple of guys in bulky
Speaker 3: Eva suits exploring an indoor space. So it seems to
Speaker 3: be the ruins of an ancient alien civilization, though unfortunately
Speaker 3: we don't see all that much of their architecture or
Speaker 3: really much texture in here at all. It's just a
Speaker 3: dark room with some hard to identify objects scattered around
Speaker 3: on the floor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is true of either kind of the film,
Speaker 1: even in the brighter theatrical cut. It's like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: they're really impressed, but this is not the egg chamber
Speaker 1: from the alien spaceship an alien. This is something more
Speaker 1: achievable based on their budget.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so the two geologists seem very excited about their find.
Speaker 3: This is a big discovery. It's some kind of ancient
Speaker 3: alien ruin. But I wasn't quite clear rob within the
Speaker 3: setting of this movie, do humans already know that aliens exist?
Speaker 3: Or is this the very first evidence of it.
Speaker 1: I mean, they've given us nothing to indicate that aliens
Speaker 1: were known of before. They mentioned new materials, but they
Speaker 1: don't say whether those are organic materials or inorganic materials,
Speaker 1: so maybe it's all new, or I mean, maybe they
Speaker 1: were expecting it. So they're like, yes, of course, alien life,
Speaker 1: we don't know.
Speaker 3: So they perform some analysis to figure out that these
Speaker 3: structures are more than two hundred thousand years old. And
Speaker 3: on the floor of this room they find a number
Speaker 3: of large, damaged capsule shaped objects that have like a
Speaker 3: viewing glass on the upper lids, and they look inside
Speaker 3: one of them and believe they see a skeleton of something,
Speaker 3: almost like these are some kind of sarcophag guy. And
Speaker 3: then they find one capsule that is actually still intact,
Speaker 3: and they look inside. They look through the glass and
Speaker 3: they see the face of some kind of creature. So
Speaker 3: they start trying to move the capsule, and then one
Speaker 3: of the scientists says, like, you know, this has been
Speaker 3: here for a quarter of a million years. If we
Speaker 3: wake it up, it's likely to be very pissed and
Speaker 3: very hungry. And then they move it anyway, and while
Speaker 3: they're examining the alien remains through the glass, that the
Speaker 3: creature inside moves, and then they're like ah, but then
Speaker 3: they just kind of like, ah, there's probably nothing. Let's
Speaker 3: forget all about it. And then one of the two
Speaker 3: guys sits on the capsule to pose for a photo
Speaker 3: with it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I love this bit because the other guy that's taking
Speaker 1: the photo is like, all right, move into the shot.
Speaker 1: And then he's telling him I need you to set
Speaker 1: on it for scale. Can you imagine if this had
Speaker 1: happened in Alien, if they were like, hey, Caine, go
Speaker 1: ahead and sit on one of those egg things because
Speaker 1: we need the folks back home to know how big
Speaker 1: it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, put your face right by it, open your mouth.
Speaker 3: I need your mouth open for scale.
Speaker 1: And so he sits on it. Of course he's like
Speaker 1: all right, all right, let's do this photo.
Speaker 3: And then chocolate syrup starts leaking out of the container
Speaker 3: and we get an attack. There's actually a really good
Speaker 3: foli here. There's like a good squishing sound effect when
Speaker 3: the alien is popping out. Maybe this wishing something inside
Speaker 3: the guy's body. But they get attacked first the goo
Speaker 3: and then the creature.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I like this. The goo's good. Again.
Speaker 1: This reminds me of the black goo that would pop
Speaker 1: up in the more recent Alien films, And you know,
Speaker 1: it's a good Like in Spacesuit Death, we get they'll
Speaker 1: they'll return to this basic effect time and time again.
Speaker 1: But a quick splat of blood on the inside of
Speaker 1: the eva heilmet Andrew good to go. I don't know
Speaker 1: how it got him. I guess it came up, like
Speaker 1: I guess, through the butt. Thats the's setting on it.
Speaker 3: After all, it's the Ghoulies approach.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the actual like biology of our creature here. There's
Speaker 1: a lot left to interpretation, but I agree that the
Speaker 1: foley works. The sound effects quite nice, and credit on
Speaker 1: this apparently goes to Marvin Kerner.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I liked a lot of the sound effects in
Speaker 3: the movie, though there are some that are a bit puzzling.
Speaker 3: Did you notice how whenever a door would open or
Speaker 3: close it played a Star Wars blaster sound effect. I
Speaker 3: guess it did.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I hadn't thought about that, but but yeah, on
Speaker 1: the whole, I felt like the sound effects helped elevate things.
Speaker 1: I should also go ahead and point out we'll probably
Speaker 1: come back to this, but the spaceship scenes.
Speaker 3: Look really good.
Speaker 1: The model work, the lighting of the model, shooting the models,
Speaker 1: space sequences in general look great. So there's a lot
Speaker 1: in this film effects wise that was done really well considered,
Speaker 1: especially considering the budget. And serves to elevate the picture.
Speaker 3: Now here's a random note about this opening scene. I
Speaker 3: believe one of the scientists in this scene is named
Speaker 3: Ted Lauandergan, and because you see the last name Laundergan
Speaker 3: on the space suit and the other guy repeatedly refers
Speaker 3: to him as Ted. Now, that is not really notable,
Speaker 3: especially since this character just dies and doesn't come back,
Speaker 3: But it is notable within the meta context of the
Speaker 3: film because apparently that is the name of the private
Speaker 3: detective who takes it too personal in Will Malone's previous movie,
Speaker 3: Scared to Death. So this is one of the many
Speaker 3: Scared to Death references within Creature that I brought up earlier.
Speaker 1: Oh man, this one's just for the Scared to Death heads.
Speaker 1: That's what we called themselves.
Speaker 3: Anyway, after this we get a title. The version I
Speaker 3: was watching for this part of the movie was called
Speaker 3: The Titan Find. Other cut is called Creature. Once again,
Speaker 3: I think I said this earlier, but I watched half
Speaker 3: of the movie in the Titan Find cut half of
Speaker 3: the movie and the Creature cut, and I don't know
Speaker 3: what I missed one way or another.
Speaker 1: I think I've read that it's mostly a little exposition,
Speaker 1: so and I don't know that a little makes a
Speaker 1: whole lot of difference.
Speaker 3: All right, after the titles, we are moving again. So
Speaker 3: next we're told it's June twenty third, I assume Earth calendar,
Speaker 3: and we're looking at the space station Concord, which is
Speaker 3: a wheel shaped sort of the Stanford Taurres space station,
Speaker 3: and we are told that it is owned by the
Speaker 3: NTI Corporation, that's the USA based one in orbit around
Speaker 3: the Earth's Moon. And we get one of you know,
Speaker 3: a classic radar room scene where there's somebody sitting in
Speaker 3: there and they say, sir, we've got we're picking up
Speaker 3: something on the on the computer. Oh, it's headed right
Speaker 3: for us. So the command center detects a spacecraft on
Speaker 3: a collision course. Then they say, we've got a visual here,
Speaker 3: and they tune all these TVs into I guess the
Speaker 3: like a stream from the cockpit of this space ship
Speaker 3: and they go, what the hell, and the pilot of
Speaker 3: the incoming ship is a fallout gool.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, It's like it's like a space a zombie
Speaker 1: from Planet of the Vampires. It's like one of the
Speaker 1: abominations that you encounter in Prometheus, is that like, well,
Speaker 1: I guess one of the one of the guys from
Speaker 1: our our opening scene is here like just fully zombified
Speaker 1: and is driving straight towards the space station, no brakes
Speaker 1: or anything.
Speaker 3: And then it hits and the space station explodes, which
Speaker 3: I wasn't quite expecting.
Speaker 1: So I was not expecting it either, Like this feels
Speaker 1: like the worst case scenario. Like it's so bad that
Speaker 1: I assumed, Okay, we're going to get a one week
Speaker 1: earlier bit on this, because maybe this isn't the same
Speaker 1: guys from the beginning. Clearly somebody returning with an alien
Speaker 1: pathogen and destroying a massive space station. That's as bad
Speaker 1: as it gets, and we have to work backwards from
Speaker 1: this disaster.
Speaker 3: But that's not the case, right, No, we're time to
Speaker 3: meet our crew, so we go to a different ship.
Speaker 3: We're cutting around a lot. Now we're on a mission
Speaker 3: to Titan. So NTI has sent a second ship called
Speaker 3: the Shinandoah to Titan with instructions to claim the artifacts
Speaker 3: discovered by the original team of scientists. So the artifacts
Speaker 3: melted the last guys made them into space zombies. You
Speaker 3: need to go get that stuff now. And it starts
Speaker 3: off when we meet everybody. They're gathered in a room
Speaker 3: that clearly looks like the interior styling of this set
Speaker 3: is supposed to be similar to the Nostromo in Alien.
Speaker 3: It's got these, you know, just a lot of the
Speaker 3: same textures, the kind of white walls with the hoses
Speaker 3: and tubes and the ridges and all that, and everybody's
Speaker 3: sitting around and they're getting a briefing by Perkins, which
Speaker 3: is the company man, the guy played by lyman Ward,
Speaker 3: and he starts off telling them like, well, whatever reasons
Speaker 3: you had for signing up for this mission, you've got
Speaker 3: to do what the company says, which you know, okay, yeah,
Speaker 3: they probably know that. And he says, you got to
Speaker 3: get these these artifacts from the Alien site. You've got
Speaker 3: to market, document it, and return any samples to NTI.
Speaker 1: And everyone, I think is mostly okay with this. They're like, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's not as much conflict over it.
Speaker 3: Yep, yep, that's what's going on except one crew member.
Speaker 3: Actually this is I think Slaydon, Beth Slaydon, played by
Speaker 3: Wendy Shawl. She's like, wait a minute, if this is
Speaker 3: a research mission where we're just supposed to recover artifacts,
Speaker 3: why do we need a security officer. And then everybody
Speaker 3: looks over at Diane Salinger just standing there in the
Speaker 3: corner of the room. She's looking very creepy at this point.
Speaker 3: She's looking very stern and robotic. It almost seems like
Speaker 3: they are setting her up to be revealed later to
Speaker 3: be an android, but they're not. She's, as far as
Speaker 3: I could tell, she's just a regular human. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Again, this is one of those characters it feels like
Speaker 1: the character was changed, either in the course of writing
Speaker 1: or in the course of shooting the film, and they
Speaker 1: just like left previous incarnations of her there because what
Speaker 1: we have here is not what we get later on,
Speaker 1: and it's not one of those things where we feel
Speaker 1: like there's significant development to get to that change.
Speaker 3: She looks very stern, and they've almost given her I
Speaker 3: don't know what you call. It's not like gothy makeup,
Speaker 3: but she looks like she looks like she's a member
Speaker 3: of a German industrial metal band, but she's also wearing
Speaker 3: the uniform of a Formula one driver.
Speaker 1: Yeah, her look is kind of I would say, zuol
Speaker 1: ask you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's good. And so Perkins can offer no
Speaker 3: explanation for why Bryce is here, he just walks away,
Speaker 3: and then the next scene is the ship's doctor, doctor Oliver,
Speaker 3: arguing with Bryce here because Bryce is confiscating and impounding
Speaker 3: drugs from the ship's onboard pharmacy and she's like, you
Speaker 3: have no right to take those. And Bryce doesn't speak
Speaker 3: at all. She's just completely like zipper lips, not a word,
Speaker 3: giving this glour at the doctor. The doctor eventually backs
Speaker 3: down like she's afraid of her. She leaves. Later dialogue
Speaker 3: reveals that she was mostly taking heavy sedatives, and then
Speaker 3: the doctor talks with a couple of other crew members.
Speaker 3: This is Finnel and Dilombre about how they've been on
Speaker 3: the ship for three months and no one has heard
Speaker 3: Bryce's talk. Isn't that weird? Once again sets it up
Speaker 3: like she's going to be a robot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was expecting that to be the twin. And
Speaker 1: you know, this is another one of those cases where
Speaker 1: I'm reminded of something in a film that would have
Speaker 1: something in a film that would come much later. But
Speaker 1: she reminds me a bit of the android enforce her
Speaker 1: character that pops up in Jason X. She does, you know,
Speaker 1: right down to like the black Vinyl you know, style.
Speaker 3: Outfit, but without the cutesy attitude. Right, Okay, next scene,
Speaker 3: we're gonna meet some more characters. We get we get
Speaker 3: a moment with the captain and with Slayden. This is
Speaker 3: Wendy Shawl again. So Slayden. When we first meet her,
Speaker 3: she's absorbed in a book and she's sort of ignoring
Speaker 3: the captain, Captain Davison who's trying to talk to her.
Speaker 3: And what's that book she's reading that she just can't
Speaker 3: put down because it's just so good. This plot is
Speaker 3: so great. It's Scared to Death, the novelization of Scared
Speaker 3: to Death once again, the previous film of William Malone.
Speaker 1: Love it in general, I love a fake book and
Speaker 1: a film. If it's central to the plot, great, If
Speaker 1: it's incidental, I'm also there for it.
Speaker 3: This has got to be at least a second run.
Speaker 3: That's a paperback. I don't know. Maybe they never did
Speaker 3: a hardcover of Scared to Death. So anyway, this is
Speaker 3: a scene where we get to see a bit of
Speaker 3: Slayden and Davison's relationship. They are clearly they have romantic
Speaker 3: interest in each other, and they're kind of playful, like
Speaker 3: she's playfully ignoring him and reading the book. He's fussing
Speaker 3: over an asynchronous chess game that they've been playing for
Speaker 3: a while, and she's gloating about how she's going to
Speaker 3: beat him soon. She's like, three moves, I'll have checkmate,
Speaker 3: and she's like a commander doesn't need to have any brains,
Speaker 3: just a strong voice, and he's like, yeah, well, by
Speaker 3: the way, he's the captain, but she's like an engineer.
Speaker 3: She's like the tech whiz on the ship. On top
Speaker 3: of this, there's another scene where we get a romantic development,
Speaker 3: which is between these two other crew members, Fennel and Delambre.
Speaker 3: They're like looking at Titan in the observation bay. She
Speaker 3: starts talking about how she knows that they're going to
Speaker 3: die there, and then they have some space romance.
Speaker 1: Which you know it will become more important later on,
Speaker 1: and it leads into again some of the better sequences
Speaker 1: in the picture.
Speaker 3: So when the ship arrives in orbit around Titan, they
Speaker 3: discover there is another ship already there, a Richter Dynamic
Speaker 3: Dynamics ship that those are their West German corporate rivals, remember,
Speaker 3: and Captain Davison here is mad at Perkins. It seems
Speaker 3: you know, Perkins, the company man, he knows about this already,
Speaker 3: but everybody else was kept in the dark about the
Speaker 3: fact that it was a corporate arms race here. And
Speaker 3: the captain is like, these crew members are civilians. They
Speaker 3: aren't trained to handle this kind of conflict, implying that
Speaker 3: things are likely to get violent between the two corporations,
Speaker 3: and Perkins is like, I don't worry about it. Bryce
Speaker 3: here can handle any rough situations that come up. She's prepared.
Speaker 3: So it seems like they're going to be competing with
Speaker 3: Richter to get to the alien stuff. But again, this
Speaker 3: is something that's like, as with many things in this movie,
Speaker 3: like it sets up a plot dynamic, only to not
Speaker 3: really have it go anywhere. But there's conflict in this
Speaker 3: scene established between the captain and the company man. So
Speaker 3: Davison is like, Okay, before we land, let's do it
Speaker 3: the safe way, and the company man is like, no,
Speaker 3: I insist you do it the stupid and dangerous way.
Speaker 3: That's an order, yep, yep. So they do, and of
Speaker 3: course it's a bumpy landing. Once the ship lands, it
Speaker 3: ends up sinking through the surface of the planet and
Speaker 3: falls into an underground cavity. Which I thought was a
Speaker 3: cool set piece. I like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, this possibility has come up on stuff to
Speaker 1: blow your mind before and talking about you know, landing
Speaker 1: on the Moon or on other planets, like this is
Speaker 1: an actual consideration that is taken into account, like can
Speaker 1: where can you land? Working you land safely? Where can
Speaker 1: you land and have like a stable place for the spacecraft?
Speaker 1: So yeah, I don't know that i'd actually seen it
Speaker 1: explored in this fashion in a film before, so I
Speaker 1: like it.
Speaker 3: The ship is damaged, of course, in the crash landing,
Speaker 3: so they're really in a pickle now. They're like, how
Speaker 3: are we going to get out of this? Davison's like, okay,
Speaker 3: we got to radio the richtership for help. We got
Speaker 3: to say, you know, please help us, even though you're
Speaker 3: our corporate rivals. You know, our lives are in danger.
Speaker 3: And Perkins is like, no, no, we will not do that,
Speaker 3: and he threatens the captain's job, and the captain doesn't care,
Speaker 3: you know. He's like, the lives of my crew are
Speaker 3: more important than your profits, and Perkins isn't so sure
Speaker 3: about that. But it's time to suit up and go outside.
Speaker 3: I guess I don't remember how they get to that point, but.
Speaker 1: I think they have to basically, like they try hailing
Speaker 1: the Richter Dynamic ship and they're not hearing anything back,
Speaker 1: so they basically have to go and knock, and there's
Speaker 1: headed back and forth where our corporate stooge is like, well,
Speaker 1: we got to bring Bryce and the big gun, and
Speaker 1: they're like, we're not bringing the gun. We're going to
Speaker 1: ask for help, and the like, okay, she can bring
Speaker 1: the gun.
Speaker 3: So they do that. They suit up, they go outside.
Speaker 3: Basically everybody goes except I think a couple of people,
Speaker 3: and they find some kind of so did you understand
Speaker 3: what they're going to hear as the German ship? They
Speaker 3: go to some kind of built infrastructure and at first
Speaker 3: I thought this was more of the alien ruins, But
Speaker 3: do you think it's actually the German ship they're going to.
Speaker 1: I believe so, but only because I went back and
Speaker 1: rewatched the first portion of the film and felt a
Speaker 1: little more confident that's where they're going.
Speaker 3: So the team, you know, they do very it's your
Speaker 3: standard kind of like sci fi environment exploring thing. The
Speaker 3: team splits up, and then the parts that split up
Speaker 3: split up again, so everybody's getting isolated so they can
Speaker 3: have scary little experiences. Inside the ship, they find breathable
Speaker 3: air and decide to remove their helmets. Always a good choice.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're like, the air's good, let's do it.
Speaker 3: Inside the labs within the ship, they find some large
Speaker 3: capsule shaped chests that viewer may remember from twenty minutes
Speaker 3: ago in the opening scene, and Delombre is looking at
Speaker 3: a capsule. She thinks it looks like some kind of
Speaker 3: egg and starts to examine it. There's one part here
Speaker 3: where she just like eats something sitting on a table
Speaker 3: and I was like, did she a jolly rancher? And
Speaker 3: she picks it up?
Speaker 1: Yeah, like it feels natural for her, Like, but I'm like,
Speaker 1: what are you doing? This is this is a this
Speaker 1: is a biologically unstable environment. Don't eat random jolly ranchers
Speaker 1: or whatever.
Speaker 3: But it looks so good. You know, I had to
Speaker 3: get this jelly roll.
Speaker 1: Here the West Germans they have great confections. You know.
Speaker 1: You can't say no to it.
Speaker 3: Ik benin contaminant. So she eats whatever it is and
Speaker 3: then oh, and then she stumbles across a bunch of
Speaker 3: dead bodies in the room and then an alien pops
Speaker 3: out and is like araw. So she runs away and
Speaker 3: finds her crewmates and they investigate, and who's coming to
Speaker 3: save the day? Of course it's Bryce, the security officer.
Speaker 3: She's got her weapon drawn, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 3: just like, here's the creature. I don't know if they
Speaker 3: paste this out the right way getting to the creature revealed.
Speaker 3: It's true that you don't get a good look at
Speaker 3: it yet, but I feel like its presence and in
Speaker 3: this moment is too sudden and overt. It doesn't really
Speaker 3: have a good build up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we don't. I mean, they do hold back
Speaker 1: a little bit, like we're not full reveal, but I
Speaker 1: think too much is revealed, and then it ends up
Speaker 1: feeling like, Okay, here's our monster, but our monster just
Speaker 1: kind of like ends up working through underlings for the
Speaker 1: rest of the picture before coming back once more at
Speaker 1: the end.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so Bryce kind of blasts at it with her
Speaker 3: ray gun, but that doesn't do anything, so the crew
Speaker 3: members have to run away and they slip through. This
Speaker 3: is a set piece I often like in sci fi
Speaker 3: movies when there's like an automatically closing mechanical door and
Speaker 3: the characters are trying to get through it fast enough,
Speaker 3: and one character is not able to get there before
Speaker 3: it slams shut. It's delambre. She's stuck outside and the
Speaker 3: gets her.
Speaker 1: We get it, and again we get another the fact
Speaker 1: that this movie really loves quick splash of blood against
Speaker 1: the glass on that door.
Speaker 3: I remember her boyfriend was Finel and he's right there
Speaker 3: when it happens. He freaks out and Bryce just jabs
Speaker 3: him in the head with an injector. Everybody's like, what
Speaker 3: are you doing? And then for the first time Bryce speaks,
Speaker 3: She's like, don't worry, it's just a tranquilizer. Oh okay, cool, Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I guess this is what she was stealing all
Speaker 1: those drugs for, so that she could trank crew members
Speaker 1: at a moment's notice.
Speaker 3: Right, if you just saw your lover get killed by
Speaker 3: an alien, I can stab you in the head with
Speaker 3: a tranquilizer and you will fall instantly unconscious. That makes sense.
Speaker 1: She doesn't want that those stressed eyes to stack up
Speaker 1: too much.
Speaker 3: I guess. So everybody leaves the labs and they come
Speaker 3: back out into the caves where the rest of the
Speaker 3: crew members are waiting, and then here for some reason,
Speaker 3: even though there may have been a good reason for this,
Speaker 3: but I don't recall what it was. Even though one
Speaker 3: member of the crew has just been killed by an alien,
Speaker 3: they just keep exploring the caves and they come across
Speaker 3: the lab where the two geologists got gooped in the intro,
Speaker 3: I believe, And then we get a jump scare with
Speaker 3: one of them uncovering something. I think it's one of
Speaker 3: the bodies from the first mission. But eventually they go
Speaker 3: back to the ship and here we get some developments. First,
Speaker 3: there's sort of a quiet, tender, nice conversation between Davison
Speaker 3: and Slayden. She's like, do you think we're going to die?
Speaker 3: And he says no, but he gives her a task.
Speaker 3: He asks her to put together a certain kind of
Speaker 3: transmitter device to radio the space station for help. But
Speaker 3: then I was thinking, wait, the space station that exploded.
Speaker 3: Do they know it exploded?
Speaker 1: Maybe there's a closer station a little sketchy on what
Speaker 1: all's out.
Speaker 3: There, Maybe it only partially exploded. But then the movie
Speaker 3: kind of kicks into high gear because we're about to
Speaker 3: meet klaus Kinski in fact, so we see like Bryce
Speaker 3: the security officer alone, She's like in her quarters, like
Speaker 3: changing and Suddenly she is attacked from out of nowhere
Speaker 3: by Klaus Kinsky. Fortunately she manages to subdue him. But
Speaker 3: I was just thinking, no, kill him now.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, because he comes off like he's just a
Speaker 1: complete animal, like he might. You're like, maybe he's even
Speaker 1: a zombie at this point and you should just put
Speaker 1: put one in his head.
Speaker 3: But no, he reveals himself to be not zombified yet
Speaker 3: he is human, and he's just he's just all over
Speaker 3: the place. I mentioned her. I was going to come
Speaker 3: back to this Kinsky as usual in any movie, Like
Speaker 3: you know, whenever he's on screen, it's kind of hard
Speaker 3: to take your eyes off him. He is, he has
Speaker 3: that spellbinding quality on screen, but it's like he's doing
Speaker 3: a completely different take on the character in every shot,
Speaker 3: and some takes he's playing him as like an obsessed,
Speaker 3: paranoid madman who's trying to warn everyone else of the danger.
Speaker 3: In other takes he's playing as a kind of relatively calm, friendly,
Speaker 3: helpful guy making good sense. In other takes, he's a
Speaker 3: malevolent sexual predator who's like violent to the rest of
Speaker 3: the crew. There's like no consistency whatsoever from moment to
Speaker 3: moment with him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it reminds me again of that famous
Speaker 1: moment at the famous scene at the very end of
Speaker 1: her Zog's Gary The Wrath of God, where Kinsky's character
Speaker 1: has this like final monologue and it's rather subdued and
Speaker 1: very powerful. But according to her Zog, it's like Kinsky
Speaker 1: didn't want to do it subdued, wanted to do it
Speaker 1: high energy and raging, and so Herzog just made him
Speaker 1: do it over and over and over again until he
Speaker 1: was just so like weakened that he actually delivered it
Speaker 1: at the level that Herzog wanted. So it's like, that's
Speaker 1: the kind of stuff you apparently had to do to
Speaker 1: get what you wanted out of Kinsky. So yeah, and
Speaker 1: then add into the fact that some of the shots
Speaker 1: that he did for Creature were unusable because he was
Speaker 1: out of focus. So you know, they're left just having,
Speaker 1: I guessed, to use what they were able to get
Speaker 1: from him, no matter how different it is seemed to see.
Speaker 3: So from here we get a number of different plot developments.
Speaker 3: One is that the crew is running low on air,
Speaker 3: so Bryce has to go out to collect air tanks
Speaker 3: from the dead astronauts, and for some reason, Hoffner is
Speaker 3: allowed to go with her, even though he has already
Speaker 3: violently attacked her earlier, and he will continue to do
Speaker 3: so as they go out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, completely nonsensible.
Speaker 3: So they then they see a bunch of dead guys
Speaker 3: while they're collecting the air tanks, and then something pops
Speaker 3: out at them and we assume they were attacked by
Speaker 3: the alien. By the way, Hoffner does deliver some lines,
Speaker 3: but it's kind of hard to process the content of them.
Speaker 3: He's talking to the crew and he talks about how
Speaker 3: the alien let's see. He reveals that he has a
Speaker 3: bunch of bombs on his ship that they could use
Speaker 3: to destroy the alien, and he also reveals that it
Speaker 3: wasn't just the alien attacking them, but it used the
Speaker 3: crew members to get each other. He said that it
Speaker 3: was which this doesn't really match with what he was
Speaker 3: just saying, but he says it's a form of collective intelligence,
Speaker 3: and we will see how this works in just a bit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And one of these sequences is where he's eating
Speaker 1: the sandwich right, yes, where that just took me out
Speaker 1: of it because I'm like, did they want him to
Speaker 1: eat the sandwich or is he like I'm eating the
Speaker 1: sandwich in this scene, I don't know.
Speaker 3: So we come to another scene where Finnel this is
Speaker 3: the character played by Robert Chaffey, is lying by a
Speaker 3: window in the ship. He's recovering from his wounds and
Speaker 3: from the tranquilizer dose after he saw his lover killed
Speaker 3: by an alien. And then suddenly outside the window on
Speaker 3: the surface of the planet, he sees Delambre. She's there
Speaker 3: and she asks for his help, and despite having seen
Speaker 3: her die, Finnyl does go out to find her. He
Speaker 3: puts on his suit, he goes to get her, and
Speaker 3: she is, of course now a zombie working for the alien.
Speaker 3: With this dynamic that develops is that a character who
Speaker 3: you thought was killed will come back with some kind
Speaker 3: of brain slug attached to their head. So like one
Speaker 3: side of the head, they've got a throbbing, slimy mass
Speaker 3: there and it's controlling their activity. And so the zombie
Speaker 3: brain slug Delambree seduces Fennel on the planet's surface and
Speaker 3: then seemingly infects him with the brain slug of his own.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like pulls his helmet off on the planet's surface.
Speaker 1: This whole sequence is great. Like I think Malone said
Speaker 1: that Originally they were going to shoot it entirely within
Speaker 1: the ship, but then they they ended up going with this.
Speaker 1: You know, she's outside, she's almost like it reminds me
Speaker 1: of scenes like I guess this was in Salem's Lot
Speaker 1: with the vampire on the outside of the window asking
Speaker 1: to be let in.
Speaker 3: You know, very spooky.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it has that power to it. So yeah, for
Speaker 1: my money, this is the creepiest sequence in the whole picture.
Speaker 1: It doesn't have a outright monster in it, you know,
Speaker 1: has a like a brain slug control vampire and it's
Speaker 1: really effective.
Speaker 3: After this, the crew that's left on the Shenandoah, they
Speaker 3: get like a zoom a call from Finnyl. He video
Speaker 3: calls them and he's like, hey, I'm over here on
Speaker 3: the German ship, and they're like, how'd you get there.
Speaker 3: He's like, I walked. I came over here because it
Speaker 3: has air and you know you're running out of air
Speaker 3: over there, so come join me. So Davison, Perkins, and
Speaker 3: the Doctor all go over to the German ship and
Speaker 3: join him there because they can get air there. Sladen
Speaker 3: stays behind on the other ship. They are greeted by
Speaker 3: Finnel who has a mysterious bandage around his head and
Speaker 3: they're like, hey, what's that. He's like, oh, yeah, there
Speaker 3: were some caustic chemicals that burned me. So that's why
Speaker 3: I've got this. By the way, doctor, come with me.
Speaker 3: Let's get away from everybody else. And there is actually,
Speaker 3: I think a quite effectively staged creepy moment here where
Speaker 3: so Jaffy is, you know, leading the doctor character alone
Speaker 3: down a hall. She's supposed to be, i think, checking
Speaker 3: out his wound while he fixes something in the engine
Speaker 3: room and he opens the doors to the engine room
Speaker 3: and it's just black inside. There's no light and he's like, oh,
Speaker 3: darn it, you know the lights are out. Just let
Speaker 3: me go fix it. I'll be right back, and then
Speaker 3: he just goes in the door and we don't cut away.
Speaker 3: The camera stays on the doctor just standing there at
Speaker 3: the open door leading into the dark room, and then
Speaker 3: we don't hear anything inside, and it goes on for
Speaker 3: a bit, and I thought this was a really effective
Speaker 3: moment where it just goes on and on a little
Speaker 3: bit and you don't know what's happening, and she starts
Speaker 3: calling out to him like what's going on, and then
Speaker 3: he's like, oh yeah, I'm in here, I'm almost done,
Speaker 3: and she eventually goes in and of course gets zombified
Speaker 3: to get her. Now, eventually the captain and the company man,
Speaker 3: who have been at odds the whole time, they grow
Speaker 3: suspicious because they're like, man, this ship is so hot
Speaker 3: and we are sweating through our outfits here. But they
Speaker 3: recalled that Finnyl was not sweating. That's weird. So they
Speaker 3: get suspicious and they're like, we got to go check
Speaker 3: things out. But by the time they get there, the
Speaker 3: doctor has already been killed, and then zombie Finnel attacks
Speaker 3: the captain, only to have his zombie head blown off
Speaker 3: by Perkins with his blaster, so the company man comes
Speaker 3: to the rescue.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Ferris Bueller's dad blows the head off of the
Speaker 1: Jaffy Zombie space zombie and it's a great head explosion,
Speaker 1: Like it's a full on like Scanner's esque sloppy head explosion,
Speaker 1: but also a little bit funny, like it's the right balance,
Speaker 1: the perfect bounce.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Meanwhile, back on the other ship, remember Sladen's the
Speaker 3: only character left there, so she's doing her engineering work.
Speaker 3: I think she's trying to fix the radio or something.
Speaker 3: And oh, here's Klauskinski, but he's zombie fyte also, so
Speaker 3: he's also been killed and brain slugged, and he is
Speaker 3: attacking Sladen though you know he was attacking people before
Speaker 3: he had a brain.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's even more terrifying now because, like the Kinsky
Speaker 1: skull is a great skull upon which to build your
Speaker 1: your special effects makeup. So he looks terrifying.
Speaker 3: So he chases her outside and eventually into the German ship.
Speaker 3: There's a fight where Davison and Perkins have to save
Speaker 3: her from the Kinski zombie. They rip the slug off
Speaker 3: of Hoffner's head and throw it on the ground and
Speaker 3: stomp on it and squish it. A good conclusion, and
Speaker 3: thus concludes the tale of the Hoffner Zombie. So there
Speaker 3: are apparently only three characters left. We've got Captain Davison,
Speaker 3: the company Man Perkins and Slade in the Engineer. They're
Speaker 3: the only ones left. And what are they going to
Speaker 3: do to defeat the big alien? Because remember there's also
Speaker 3: the different thing. There's the alien they encountered at the
Speaker 3: beginning in the ship here, apart from all the zombies
Speaker 3: that it is apparently making. I think maybe the brain
Speaker 3: slug is like part of the alien that comes off
Speaker 3: of it and reanimates the corpses of the humans that
Speaker 3: it has has killed.
Speaker 1: I don't have a clear understanding. I don't know if
Speaker 1: the yeah, these are part of the alien's anatomy, or
Speaker 1: these are other organisms that it is using, or this
Speaker 1: is biotechnology. It's left wide open, so I don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't have any strong theories.
Speaker 3: But anyway, we get to a thing next that I
Speaker 3: absolutely love, which is Slaydon's plan for defeating the alien.
Speaker 3: And what she says is, I have an idea. I
Speaker 3: saw a movie once where people were trapped on an
Speaker 3: ice station by a carrot from outer space and they
Speaker 3: killed it by electrocuting it. They set up a grid
Speaker 3: on the floor as a trap, and they lured it
Speaker 3: onto the grid and they electrocuted it. And I realized,
Speaker 3: and they for Perkins and Davison laugh at her, but
Speaker 3: then they end up going with her plan. And I
Speaker 3: think this is great because she is accurately describing the
Speaker 3: plot of the thing from another world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, it's I really enjoyed just how overt it
Speaker 1: was to it would be like, give like what if
Speaker 1: Ripley an alien had said, you know, I saw a
Speaker 1: movie once where a little boy was left home alone
Speaker 1: at Christmas and he outwitted the enemies with a series
Speaker 1: of clever traps. Let's do that. Let's do home alone
Speaker 1: on this alien.
Speaker 3: Do we have a bb gun on board? I need
Speaker 3: paint cans.
Speaker 1: But they agree, like this, we can do this, we
Speaker 1: can we have even more power on the ship. We
Speaker 1: can route into this system.
Speaker 3: Let's do it. Yep. So they do it. It's Slayton's plan,
Speaker 3: and they have to like, you know, guard her while
Speaker 3: she's doing all the electrical work that needs to be done.
Speaker 3: But she arranges it and it works, or so it seems.
Speaker 3: They zap the monster with all this electricity. It falls dead, apparently,
Speaker 3: and then the two guys wander off to go, I
Speaker 3: don't know, do something else. But then Slayton is like, oh,
Speaker 3: she's a little curious. Maybe she's not sure it's dead.
Speaker 3: So she goes over to give it a little nudge
Speaker 3: with the tip of her shoe, and then we get
Speaker 3: a classic dead monster revival. It pops up. We get
Speaker 3: the monster pop up. Gotta love it.
Speaker 1: That's right, We're gonna have to move on to Plan B, right,
Speaker 1: you know what B stands for.
Speaker 3: It stands for better depend on the company man. See,
Speaker 3: he actually has a surprising arc so per So the
Speaker 3: monster pops up, it seizes Slaydon. The two guys go
Speaker 3: to investigate, and they like look through the glass in
Speaker 3: the hallway and they see that Slayden is there. She's alive,
Speaker 3: but she is unconscious being held hostage, like hanging upside down,
Speaker 3: guarded by the alien. So they're like, what are we
Speaker 3: gonna do? What are we gonna do?
Speaker 1: Uh?
Speaker 3: And Perkins comes up with the plan. He's like, we
Speaker 3: got to blow it out of the airlock there you
Speaker 3: go in the med O. And while he's trying to
Speaker 3: set up this plan, he finds the bombs that Kinsky
Speaker 3: was talking about, so he's like, oh yeah, here are
Speaker 3: some bombs also. So while he's like setting up that
Speaker 3: blow it out the airlock trap, Davison goes into the
Speaker 3: room and rescues Sladon, and meanwhile the alien attacks Perkins
Speaker 3: the company man. It attacks him, and then the other
Speaker 3: two characters come and find him as sort of in
Speaker 3: a gory embrace with the alien. It's like ripping out
Speaker 3: his neck. They're both sitting right on the trap door
Speaker 3: of the airlock, and Perkins looks at them and he's like,
Speaker 3: you've got it right where you want it to, do it.
Speaker 3: Do it? So they hit the button and Perkins and
Speaker 3: the alien get dumped outside, so company man to the
Speaker 3: rescue in the end. And I think it's an interesting
Speaker 3: arc because it's the opposite of the Burke arc in Aliens,
Speaker 3: where in Aliens Burke seems like a nice guy at first,
Speaker 3: and then as the story progresses he is revealed to
Speaker 3: be a through and through slime ball and a complete
Speaker 3: coward and only interested in himself. Perkins is kind of
Speaker 3: the opposite. At first. He's a, you know, a hard nosed,
Speaker 3: you know, totally selfish, bottom line kind of guy. He
Speaker 3: doesn't care about anybody else. But he sort of saves
Speaker 3: the day here, but it doesn't last because well they
Speaker 3: dump it out the airlock. But then the alien just
Speaker 3: sort of comes around the side of the building like
Speaker 3: it comes in through the other entrance. But when it does,
Speaker 3: it's still got the bomb that Perkins had stuck to it.
Speaker 3: So Davison is like, well, I got to deal with this,
Speaker 3: and so he goes and meets it at the airlock
Speaker 3: and drop kicks the alien back outside. Great, yes, very good.
Speaker 3: He's like fighting it outside where it said that the
Speaker 3: temperature is like negative two hundred degrees fahrenheit, and like
Speaker 3: he can't breathe, there's no atmosphere he can breathe. So
Speaker 3: he's like choking and he sees the bomb timer on
Speaker 3: the alien go down to zero, but then it doesn't explode,
Speaker 3: and Davison, lying there on the exposed surface of Saturn's
Speaker 3: moon titan, chokes out the line it didn't go off
Speaker 3: to no one in particular. There's nobody out there to
Speaker 3: hear him, except suddenly a character who we thought was dead,
Speaker 3: the security officer Bryce. She appears from out of nowhere
Speaker 3: in a spacesuit with her blaster and shoots the bomb
Speaker 3: and then says, oh, yes it did, replying to his
Speaker 3: it didn't go off, and then the alien explodes and
Speaker 3: that's the end. That's great.
Speaker 1: They do a Jaws on it, basically, yeah, yeah, something
Speaker 1: explosive strapped to our monster. Shoot the object, blow it up.
Speaker 3: You see it.
Speaker 1: You see a Jaws pulled on monsters now and again
Speaker 1: in these types of films, it's always a nice moment.
Speaker 3: What did you so? Then we so this time it's
Speaker 3: defeated for real, and our survivors blast off and head
Speaker 3: back to Earth. I guess. And the survivors again are Davison, Slayton,
Speaker 3: and Bryce, And what did you make of the I
Speaker 3: Got lost thing? They're like, what what happened to you?
Speaker 3: We thought you were dead? And then she sort of
Speaker 3: sheepishly admits I got lost, and I think she says
Speaker 3: it multiple times. What's going on there?
Speaker 1: I have no idea, no idea what they intended with that,
Speaker 1: if it's supposed to just be funny, or if it
Speaker 1: was just kind of like a patchwork, like they felt
Speaker 1: like they had to acknowledge it. I didn't feel like
Speaker 1: they had to acknowledge she was at all, Like she
Speaker 1: almost died in some encounter with a with the alien
Speaker 1: that ended up turning Hans Rudy into a zombie. So
Speaker 1: I don't really think I needed an explanation of where
Speaker 1: she was, but I guess the film felt otherwise.
Speaker 3: Well, anyway, they're headed home. Oh and then a laugh
Speaker 3: out loud moment for me was Bryce hands Slayte in
Speaker 3: her copy of the novelization of Scared to Death the
Speaker 3: director's other film, like oh great, thank you, and that's
Speaker 3: the end.
Speaker 1: She points out earlier that it's the only book she brought.
Speaker 1: That's why she keeps rereading it, and she likes it. Yes,
Speaker 1: so there's not a great library on the shep into
Speaker 1: a a lot of hallandin Foster.
Speaker 3: Well, I was gonna say, you just basically they got
Speaker 3: scared to death and dianetics.
Speaker 1: You know, you're just speaking of novelizations. I noticed that
Speaker 1: there's like a contemporary author who has gone back and
Speaker 1: made novelizations for various films that didn't have them, including Creature.
Speaker 1: So there is an novelization of Creature out there, but
Speaker 1: it's like a recent work of fiction, So don't I
Speaker 1: don't know what it's like, but I admire the hustle there.
Speaker 3: Maybe it'll fill in some of the plot gaps and
Speaker 3: make more of like the Okay, so things we mentioned
Speaker 3: earlier that did not really end up playing a big role.
Speaker 3: The corporate rivalry. I mean it's a little bit there
Speaker 3: in the setting, like, okay, so there's another a ship
Speaker 3: from another company, but like they play it up like
Speaker 3: the corporate rivalry is going to be a conflict within
Speaker 3: the plot, and it just isn't really.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, there's the whole issue robot and she doesn't talk,
Speaker 1: doesn't really go anywhere. Uh. There are a lot of
Speaker 1: things like that in this film, which you know, you
Speaker 1: don't have to you don't You don't have to fire
Speaker 1: every cannon you bring on the deck, you know. I
Speaker 1: recently reread Frank Herbert to Done Again, and honestly, one
Speaker 1: of the pleasures that I really love in that book
Speaker 1: is are the various ideas and tangents that that aren't explored,
Speaker 1: that we the places where it seems like the plot
Speaker 1: could go but they don't. Like there's this brief bit
Speaker 1: where they're like where it's mentioned that that pider de Vere,
Speaker 1: the twisted mentat of the Baron Harkenan, may be intending
Speaker 1: to obtain a Chris Knife and then since he has
Speaker 1: blue the blue eyes of the Fremen, he's going to
Speaker 1: potentially go out and pretend to be a Fremen to
Speaker 1: work his evil on the surface of Aracus. And that
Speaker 1: never comes to fruition. But it's just one of those
Speaker 1: little teases of like, wow, what if what if it
Speaker 1: had gone in that direction? What would have that consisted of?
Speaker 1: So you know, it's you know, you can you can
Speaker 1: lay out possibilities and not follow through on them. But
Speaker 1: there are a number of those moments in this film
Speaker 1: that ultimately feel again more like in the moment editing
Speaker 1: and changing, rather than an exploration of possibility.
Speaker 3: They feel more accidentally abandoned rather than intentionally abandoned.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but still, I have to say, a really fun flick,
Speaker 1: some fun effects, some fun performances, and some legit nimtally
Speaker 1: creepy moments, coupled with some moments that are a little blonk here,
Speaker 1: Like we were saying when the when the monster is
Speaker 1: finally fully present. In these final moments, there's often an
Speaker 1: undeniable like rubber suit feel to it. It's a pretty
Speaker 1: good rubber suit, you know, but it's you know, it's
Speaker 1: it is what it is.
Speaker 3: I liked it when we saw the monster. I mean,
Speaker 3: obviously it's supposed to look like the monster from Alien
Speaker 3: and it doesn't look realistic, but I love the look
Speaker 3: like it's fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's you know, it's nice and and
Speaker 1: greasy and oily and it's got It looks a lot
Speaker 1: like a xenomorph in some respects, but it has like
Speaker 1: big red eyes that glow.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then of course it's it's swinging brain slugs at people,
Speaker 1: and we're not entirely sure if those are of its body,
Speaker 1: if those are biotechnology, or if it's another species that
Speaker 1: it uses who knows well.
Speaker 3: I in the end also very much enjoyed creature.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it. Enjoyment is keys. All other concerns secondary.
Speaker 1: All Right, we're gonna go ahead and close the book
Speaker 1: on Creature aka Titan find here, but we'd love to
Speaker 1: hear from everyone out there if you have thoughts on
Speaker 1: it from watching it back in the day, from watching
Speaker 1: it for the first time now or rediscovering it and
Speaker 1: so forth, or if you have thoughts in general on
Speaker 1: Alien and alien clones that came out afterwards, films that
Speaker 1: led up to Alien. All of this is stuff we
Speaker 1: would love to talk about. And we still may come
Speaker 1: back and do Ridley Scott's Alien Here on Weird House
Speaker 1: Cinema in the future, or maybe we'll just do another
Speaker 1: knockoff at some point. I don't know that both are
Speaker 1: fun possibilities.
Speaker 3: I think it's unavoidable that we will do multiple Alien
Speaker 3: knockoffs in the future. There are a lot of them.
Speaker 3: We'll get around to them, all right.
Speaker 1: Just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
Speaker 1: primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on
Speaker 1: Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays we set aside most
Speaker 1: serious concerns to just talk about a weird film here
Speaker 1: on Weird House Cinema. You want to see a list
Speaker 1: of all the all the films we've done over the years.
Speaker 1: The best place to do that is go on over
Speaker 1: to letterbox dot com. It's l E T T E
Speaker 1: R B O x D dot com. Our username is
Speaker 1: weird House, and we have a list there. You can
Speaker 1: look at all the films. You can look at all
Speaker 1: the the box arts, almost like a little little digital
Speaker 1: version of a of a movie rental place.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: And indeed it you know, it hooked up so that
Speaker 1: when you click on a title, you can click at
Speaker 1: where to find and it'll tell you, oh, well, you
Speaker 1: can buy it, rent it digitally here, you can stream
Speaker 1: it here, you can buy a physical copy here, copy here.
Speaker 1: It's often a great like a great resource for me
Speaker 1: when I'm looking at potential films to cover on Weird
Speaker 1: House and I have to tackle that big question, how
Speaker 1: are we going to watch it? Where are we going
Speaker 1: to seek it? Out, Can we stream it, can we
Speaker 1: get ahold of a digital release? Has it been remastered?
Speaker 1: Or are we going to have to, you know, look
Speaker 1: for some sort of a what what? What was the
Speaker 1: way that we watched the work?
Speaker 3: Best?
Speaker 1: The movie that was like a Dutch subtitled YouTube rip
Speaker 1: or something. Yes, yes, not the preferred format. A huge
Speaker 1: thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Speaker 1: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 1: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 1: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 1: you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com.
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