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Creature (1985)

Obviously - Creature was made to ride the coattails of Alien's popularity. (In recent memory think Hansel & Gretel with NO ONE ANYONE KNOWS AND Hansel &Gretel: Witch Hunters with that guy from Avengers and that broad from Quantum of Solace).

If you've seen Alien, you don't really need to watch Creature to know what happens; like 90% of the shots are exact recreations of shots in Alien. Which is not to say that the level of technical skill that went in making Alien is at all represented in the pathetic, low-budget abomination that is Creature.

Really, the biggest difference between the movies is that the aliens in Creature are like cousins of the giant earwigs from Star Trek that take over your body and make you play out their nefarious plans for world domination. It's a very different take on the fears of maternity and rape that Alien really drove home and inherently changes the type of terror. Alien makes you feel violated - physically dirty and uncomfortable. Creature fails to leverage the horror at it's fingertips - loss of self control or loss of your free will could be absolutely chilling.

Making the aliens less murderous and more body-taking-over-ish leads to this strangely sexy but entirely creepy make out scene that kind of reminded me why people loved Species and why Lifeforce was ever watched by more than one human, ever.

In case you're worried that the plot and the visuals are the only derivative elements of the movie - don't. The score sounded like a mashup of the Alien score and the theme from Star Trek.

But then, in a strange twist, they may have actually inspired some future special effects; randomly the aliens end up having what I might term "Predator vision" (which you'll later see in, d'uh, Predator).

Creature completely turned me into a raving, MST3K maniac; alone on my couch, shouting at the screen, "PHRASING?!" while the two dudes at the beginning of the movie bickered about "sitting on it." Then when the doctor "confesses" that she's not what she seems, "I'm a veterinarian!" Although it turns out she's a biophysicist or something BUT really she's just a moron who then wanders into a dark room with the guy who was just MISSING for like a whole day on an alien planet. And finally, we get to the end of the movie and the blonde version of Ripley starts telling the other survivors about a movie she saw where a team of scientists in Antarctica defeat a monster... and I was laughing at how people in horror movies are usually doing things that are SO DUMB that you're left wondering, "have they ever seen a movie?" and here she is using The Thing as a plan for beating the monster.

How did this fucking movie win 2 awards for best anything? How?!

Right. You can watch the Creature trailer here:
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