Topic: Mutant

[Lithurge]

Well this turned out slightly longer than I thought.

Fair warning I love bad movies, so depending on where you stand on those depends on how much my opinion will mean to you.

Mutant

Synopsis
A 1982 Alien rip-off produced by Roger Corman. The members of a genetic research team on a far distant planet in, the far distant future are threatened by a hideous organism of their creation...a man-eating creature, capable of changing its organic structure as it grows and matures.

Review

As I said I like bad movies and this one is a not too bad bad movie. It has all the elements I look for in this kind of film, acting that is just the right side of bad, i.e. most of the actors are actually capable of some sort of emotion, small amounts of nudity, a big horrible creature and lots of goo.

Although inspired by Alien I would say it's probably closer to Inseminoid. The characters are, as you should expect, pretty one dimensional, the 'hero' is the typical 80's cheapo horror film, seen it all and has sex with any available woman type. The base commander is trying to hide something, there's one 'clever' female type, who's too clever for her own good, one 'stupid but pretty' female who screams a lot (and seems to serve no actual purpose on the base), a token ethnic minority who's the engineer/ other action man, the real clever, but ill male scientist and finally the female robot, who doesn't do much in the way of robotic things but does have a big laser gun. As far as I can see she was made a root so they could turn her off and not have her character in large chunks of the film. Oh I nearly forgot the buff male janitor and the security guard, who were the least memorable characters clearly.

The story pretty much follows the form of these films, the hero is called in to troubleshoot the problem on the base instead of being allowed to return home for leave, once there we learn the scientist have been experimenting with genetics and bacteria to try and solve food shortage problems, they have, of course, made the mistake of combining the incredibly fast replicating bacteria they've found with the wrong type of creature. The creature has already escaped and killed all the lab animals, before cocooning itself in an incubator with the scientists refusing to destroy it. The janitor is left to clean up the dead animals in the lab and before you know it the cocoon opens and the creature is on the loose, picking people off one by one.

It really does tick all the cliche boxes until the end when it propose the most ingenious way of killing the creature, although you'll have to watch it to see if it works.

A quick note, although there are a lot of deaths in the film it saves the 'gore' budget for a couple of goo set pieces, so don't expect to see much when people actually die.

Design
The set design isn't actually too bad, with a grimy feel and solid look to the base, lighting is pretty dim in keeping with the mood, although the robot's head didn't half remind me of the troopers helmets from Star Wars. There is a scene set outside the base, which is fairly obviously a desert in the US somewhere, but they did a good job with a giant cocoon in the scene, again the design of this reminded me of the face huggers from Alien, and the alien creature once formed looked like an Alien, from the film that inspired this one, after a few too many doughnuts. It certainly wasn't as convincing and sadly with the budget it only stretched to changing its structure twice.

Conclusion

If you love cheesey sci-fi or horror I can thoroughly recommend this as a good way to spend 72 minutes (did I mention it's short).