10 Horror Movie Rip-Offs You Won’t Believe Exist
9. Creature (1985)
A huge multinational corporation sends a ship to investigate an alien presence on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. An alien monster finds its way aboard and infects the crew, turning some of them into parasitised extensions of itself. Paranoid and isolated, victimised by gruesome death and sinister sabotage, the crew are forced to fight back, eventually ejecting the creature through the airlock and blowing it up.
That description reads as though it was written in a deliberate attempt to cannibalise the best storylines and set pieces from both Alien and John Carpenter’s The Thing… which, by an astonishing coincidence, is exactly what the experience of watching Creature is actually like.
Still, horror fans being horror fans, you couldn’t be blamed for reading it and being tempted to seek out a copy of the movie, so to save you all that googling...
When it comes down to it, Creature isn’t a truly terrible movie. There’s a little talent at work here, which unfortunately makes the brazen plot-theft all the more pathetic. It’s like shoplifting snacks when you can afford to pay for them.
After a few fallow years, writer/director William Malone went on to direct the official remake of The House On Haunted Hill in 1999, indulging his odd knack for competently ripping off/homaging other people’s films without skirting copyright infringement.