Blood Sputnik

I had Sputnik (2020) on my queue for some reason - I suppose I'd seen an early review somewhere, but I tried not to read enough to get spoiled. So I didn't really know what to expect. But as soon as Ms. Spenser read the sleeve copy on the Netflix envelope, she said, "Huh, sounds like Night of the Blood Beast."

Like Blood Beast, it starts in space. Two Soviet cosmonauts are re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, when they hear a clunk on the capsule. This isn't good. When the recovery team gets to them, one cosmonaut has no face, and the other is in bad shape.

Next we meet Oksana Akinshina, a beautiful, skilled but unconventional doctor. She is getting blasted by a review board, even though she helped the patient. After, Col. Fyodor Bondarchuk recruits her for a secret project. It is the surviving cosmonaut, Pyotr Fyodorov. The current psychologist is trying to find out what happened by hypnotizing him. Now, a disclaimer - I am very susceptible to hypnotism in movies, so I may have fallen into a deep sleep at times during this movie. But it has a certain deliberate pace, so I don't think I missed much.

Little by little, they let Akinshina on the problem. At night, when Fyodorov is asleep, a slimy alien crawls out of his mouth. This creature, who looks like an attenuated Demogorgon, lives in his esophagus when he's awake. And he doesn't know about it. They are trying to figure out how to separate them without killing Fyodorov.

Later, she discovers that the creature eats peoples heads, and they are feeding it convicts every night. Of course, they want it for military purposes.

All this is done in a deliberate, tense, almost art-house style. 

Now, if you aren't familiar with Night of the Blood Beast, you have been missing one of the great Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes. It's a black and white horror produced by Roger Corman, about the days when NASA was two guys in a pickup truck. An astronaut runs into trouble on re-entry, and seems to be dead when they find him. They take him back to the lab (a ranger station?) and find that he is dead, but isn't decayng. In fact, he wakes up, feeling pretty good. But a flouroscope reveals that he is full of shrimp-like alien embryos. Are they friendly? You guess.

So, not exactly the same. But clearly influenced by. You'd have to ask director Egor Abramenko.