Star Crystal - 1986

Star Crystal –

When I was a kid I rented this movie based on the box art alone and watched it in the dusky morning hours before school started; when the rest of the family laid asleep I subjected my fragile young mind to horrors from beyond, unimaginable snot covered nightmare beings that sucked the blood right out of you with thorny tentacles dripping with slime leaving you a spongy, mummified, ooze covered corpse.  Star Crystal terrified my school boy psyche with images of a glowing snot monster squeezing limbs with tentacles until they burst with blood.   A scavenger mission to Mars yields a strange discovery, a large 300,000 year old crystal formation that behaves more like a computer than a rock.  Shortly after recovering the object the scavenger crew’s shuttle suffers an oxygen malfunction and all aboard are killed through asphyxiation, leaving only frozen corpses drifting through space.  2 months later the rudderless shuttle craft is intercepted by a floating space station but soon after docking with it, the station suffers a critical “blackout 7” malfunction, and explodes killing thousands.  Only a handful of technicians survive by escaping on the same craft that holds the mysterious Star Crystal.  Within the first ten minutes of the movie the body count already racks up considerably, then the creature gore begins.  The crew discovers there is another life form on board, one that corners its victims smothering them with horn covered tentacles, sucking their life juices from them until they prune up into a desiccated corpse.  The creature kills several members of the crew in short order, prompting some pretty funny freak out moments from the survivors “Damn it, DAMN IT!”  They also realize the creature is intelligent as it uses its crystal to hack into the computers systems.  In a goofy unforeseeable twist they learn that the creature’s viscous attacks were all part of some sort of misunderstanding, stupid humans.  What follows is an 80’s montage of the snot creature (which calls himself Gar) working with the surviving 2 crew members on the ship, playing games, goofing around, calling people jerks.  Gar the snot creature from space that feasts on human blood ends up being a real sweetie and the movie ends with hugs and high fives.