Okay, going to use the Nightmare On Film Street 31 Days list as a springboard to avoid a total blank page but not adhere entirely to it, as it's more for picking old favourites than going into the unknown, and indeed I’ll start by flipping #1 upside down for something I haven’t seen before.
Nobody appears to have claimed that $50,000, presumably because going to Mars would cost more than that anyway.
The “Rad Remake” prompt suggests a remake you already know is good and I wanted to start on something new to me. And I just rewatched Alien last week because I'm getting a chance to play the RPG so I thought reverse it and watch one of the things it's half a remake of, along with Planet Of The Vampires which I got to see last year as well as two A. E Van Vogt stories as well as the work of people who were actually involved.
In the thrilling future on 1973, a mission to Mars ended in disaster and now a second mission has come to retrieve the sole survivor for court martial, accused of murdering the rest of the crew. Which is a great hook but also a very expensive dedication to giving him a fair hearing when pretty much everybody believes he’s guilty.
What actually happened is that “It” killed the crew, and snuck on board the new ship. Possibly a survivor from an ancient Martian civilisation (so not from beyond space, but never mind) It now craves moisture. They figure this out reasonably quickly and spend the rest of the film trying to get rid of It. It’s pretty tough - resistant to bullets, grenades and the radiation from the ship’s engine. (Good thing the ship is tough too - at no point do any of the compartments depressurise.)
There's a lot of The Thing From Another World here, with the lumbering take on the monster, the difficulty of killing It and some distrust among the crew.
It itself is pretty disappointing. The look is fine, especially when initially in shadow, but Ray “Crash” Corrigan plays It much like he often played gorillas, making It too expressive to seem really threatening. At one point It puts a claw to its chin to show it’s thinking, which is kind of adorable.
The gender politics have not aged well, two of the crew are women and one of them is medical officer but they both serve dinner and coffee for the men, but at least the alternate poster showing It carrying one of them doesn’t actually happen - It carries off quite a few of the men instead. (The Thing From Another World was better about this seven years earlier so that’s no excuse.)
Favourite bit that didn’t get into Alien - one of the crew is cornered but has a flamethrower, so he’s stuck there fending It off for quite a while, getting increasingly cranky over the radio as he waits for rescue.
I also liked the lack of sound in space, though the electronic music cue gets really repetitive - and it didn’t help that Sam Raimi used something very like it in Evil Dead II when Ash is alone in the cabin and dealing with the empty rocking chair, and my mind will take any excuse to think about Evil Dead II.
So not a huge fan, but it has some nice moments of its own as well as the bits Alien reused, and the quickly discarded initial setup is great too.
Gameability: small group of people in an enclosed space trying to get rid of a monster, yes that's gameable.
