Virginia Madsen in Creator

I’m just going to go ahead and say it. Creator is a goofy, goofy film. I just wanted to get that off my chest. It won’t be the last time we see Virginia Madsen in such a film, or the last, but I felt it should be said from the off.

Creator is a film from 1985, and it won’t be the first (or last) time I say this about a film on this site, but you can tell it’s from the 80’s.

OK, here we go… Deep breath…

Dr. Harry Wolper (Peter O’ Toole) is a Medical Professor teaching at a small college in Southern California. His wife died 30 years earlier and he’s obsessed with being able to make a lone of her. To help him achieve this he enlists the help of Boris Lafkin (Vincent Spano) and Meli (Mariel Hemingway).

Boris is smitten with a fellow student, Barbara Spencer (who else but Virginia Madsen) and Meli, smitten with Harry (53 and 24 at the time of filming – don’t mention the age difference!).
In exchange for Boris’s help appropriating Lab Equipment to help him with his experiments, Harry offers up advice on how to woo Barbara, although his advice is sometimes, interesting.

Meli is there to donate her ovaries to Harry’s experiment in the hope he sees her as more than just an egg donor. Which, to be fair works in the end…

Hi-jinks and adventures ahoy as the film bounds on through it’s comedic vibe of love and resurrection until Barbara one day suffers a brain aneurysm and falls into a deep coma. It doesn’t look good and it looks as though the machine keeping her alive might be best turned off. Both Harry and Boris work their damnedest to stop that from happening and save the young beauty.

And, they all live happily after.

I did say it was goofy! But, I mean come on, look at that smile on Virginia Madsen there.It’s very nearly a good film, I think I should probably like it more than I do. And, I’ve a feeling it’s one of those that if you where around for at the time you might have a better opinion of it than I do. It’s not that I dislike it, I’m just not sure what it is at times. I wasn’t around to see it on release, it would be a good twenty or so years later when I was hunting down Virginia Madsen films to watch that I first found it on a discounted VHS tape. I got a DVD copy in the end and watched it again, but it still didn’t sit right.

I half watched it as part of the rewatch thing I’m doing but it didn’t hold my interest much, I weirdly remembered it quite well and in this day and age the “romance” between Meli and Harry stands out like a sore thumb and I found myself wondering if they’d even be able to film something like that today without causing the internet to uproar and a frenzied fit of keyboards.

The Eighties man, different times.

Creator is based on the novel of the same name by Jeremy Leven, the novel came out in 1980 and Jeremy himself would do the screen play for the film version, there are some changes but the idea remains the same.

Have to say, Peter O’ Toole is in FINE form in this film, no idea what goes on in that mans head but I’d watch him, watch paint dry if it existed. Huge fan of the man, proper old school didn’t care about who he was and what people thought about him.

Virginia Madsen is good as well, I mean – As good as she can be, it’s another early role for her and she’s just along for the ride on this one I’d imagine but you can’t complain about her performance in any way.

I guess for Virginia Madsen, Creator was a quirky stepping stone in her early career. It’s certainly not the film she’s best known for, and I vert much doubt she’d want it to be. But her natural screen presence shines through even in the relatively short amount of screen time and even in a world of far-fetched science experiments and unlikely romance.

If nothing else, Creator is a curious time capsule from the 80’s, and a reminder that even the most offbeat projects have their charm.

Availability:
Yeah, good – More or less freely available on DVD on the cheap and can be found on Streaming services to rent or buy easily enough.

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