Sputnik

A monster movie can live or die with its monster. If it's a crappy one it can kill the film in its tracks, not matter how good the rest of the film is. There are exceptions to this rule of course, Jacques  Tourneur's Night Of The Demon for example but usually a badly conceived or designed monster will turn a film laughable. On the other hand a well designed creature can turn a film with a cliched story into something memorable. This is the case with Sputnik. *Shudder*

The year is 1983. The cold war between the East and the West is still on the verge of turning into something fiery. The USSR is always looking for that something special, something they can use on their enemies that's all their own. Now, in an isolated military base they might have that very thing. A spaceship has returned to Earth and there's something very wrong with Konstantin (Pyotr Fyodorov), the surviving kosmonaut. Dr. Tatyana Klimova (Oksana Akinshina) is brought in to study him but she's unclear on the details of his illness until one night she gets to witness a parasitic life-form crawl out of him while he's sleeping. Her job is to figure out the relationship between man and parasite. The army all around her....well it's their job to figure out how to use it as a weapon.

I liked this a lot. It's not perfect but enough about it works to turn it in a memorable genre piece. It's full of ropey tropes and feels like it's been put together from a dozen other films but it's solid central pairing of Tatyana and Konstantin gives it a humanity that grounds the story when the blood begins to spill. It gets gory, not alienatingly so but there's enough squelch here to keep horror fans smiling, especially in the second half of the story. All of it courtesy of the little fella from space who hitched a ride back with Konstantin. A little fella that made me genuinely squirm. Kinda humanoid but moving like an arachnid, curious at one angle and terrifying at another, intelligent but brutal (huh, wait a minute...) at the same time, all scuttly and rapid forward bursts, those beady little eyes, dozens of them bunched together on it's little face, the way it devours by ripping and shredding. When it's onscreen you can't relax, it's slimy, it's tactile, it's rather unpleasant and like a spider it's unpredictable and it's here Sputnik really succeeds. I'd rather face the predator or a xenomorph anyday.

Where it doesn't succeed is the identikit setting, manned by faceless goons, barking orders through the gloominess of badly lit offices and laboratories. It's a setting that harks back to way too many 90's & 00's DTV horrors and at some junctions you'll struggle to keep your attention but thankfully the pre Perestroika setting and the adjoining paranoia/ bureacracy of the era keeps things going between the scares. Colonel Semiradov (Fedor Bondarchuk), the man in charge of the base is a nice touch, friendly at first but soon we realise he's a proxy for the powers that be in Moscow and at times he's almost as scary as the parasite. Ok, not quite but he's easily as vicious. Plus we all know a good boo-hiss villain tends to equal gooey satisfaction at the climax.....

Sputnik is a scifi horror with scares and substance. It's a rare Russian production, an actual crowd pleaser, devoid of that air of pretension that plagues a lot of Russian cinema, especially the ones that get Western releases. Think less Andrei Tarkovsky, more J.J. Abrams.

Available on google movies now.