This sci-fi movie wanted to compete with Aliens, but it didn’t stand a chance

You’re the late 80’s sci-fi flicks hitting movie screens around the world and you want to ride the wave. Except you’re a director in Italy, at a time when so-called “biographical” exploitation cinema is going through a real decline and not many people care anymore. So what to do with the idea of ​​a movie set on an island inhabited by aliens?

Answer: Do it anyway! And this is undoubtedly how Alien was born, a creature of the abyss, not at all a subtle and wrong mixture of Alien.

Like this movie that was as good as Conan the Barbarian: we can say no!

James Cameron doesn’t want to

The film follows Jane, a journalist, who arrives on a Pacific island to investigate a nuclear testing facility that is destroying its nuclear waste by dumping it in a volcano. Before he can sneak into the factory, his operator is captured by a surveillance team, and by dumping the debris, the awakened creature exits the volcano with the intention of leaving no survivors behind.

Directed by Antonio Marguerite – Anthony M. Dawson’s usual pseudonym – uses pathetic models, images stolen from other films and his script makes no sense. He plays to fill 1 hr. 30, which will be marketed as an alien movie and should bring in a few bucks.

Bulldozer finale

In the grand finale of Alien, Creature from the Abyss tries to replicate certain scenes from the finale of Alien without any means, copying Ripley’s little outfit from the first film. Since the movie doesn’t have an exoskeleton, he falls back on a bulldozer (also yellow) and adds a flamethrower (also present in Aliens) to give it an epic feel, to no avail.

Fans of bis cinema will recognize Luciano Pigozzi, who appeared in many films between the 60s and 80s, many of them Antonio Margheriti, as well as Roberto Dell’Acqua and, more famously, Charles Napier, most notably in Rambo II. The Blues Brothers, The Silence of the Lambs or Philadelphia.

Ironically enough, the film’s international title is Alien from the Deep, a title very close to James Cameron’s Aliens from the Deep (2005), which follows a series of expeditions exploring deep-sea resources. But it is very likely that Cameron has never heard of Marguerite’s film.