CAUTION: Plot spoilers present.
The crew of the Zortron 101, an oil rig stationed off the coast of Antarctica & working 'off the books' in order to find a secret stash of oil, discover some small rocks that come up when the drill hits a depth of 19,000 feet. The rocks are then revealed to be some sort of eggs, which have been underground for untold millennia. When a crew member touches one of the eggs, he goes crazy & commits suicide by jumping overboard. The eggs hatch, revealing eel-like creatures that attack a worker before being killed by the rest of the crew. The victim is then driven to rape a female crewmember who gives birth to a hideous humanoid creature that then proceeds to massacre the crew.
The Intruder Within was a 1981 telepic that came hot on the heels of the classic ALIEN, indeed being one of the very first such knockoffs. The producers decided to set the film on an isolated oil rig off the Antarctic coast & make the monster a prehistoric creature.
Being an early-1980s telepic, The Intruder Within clearly doesn't have the budget to seriously compete with Alien, but that doesn't stop the director, Peter Carter, & crew from trying. And they give it a game try. The oil rig setting is unusual but it manages to work better for the film's limited budget. The visual effects are clearly primitive – consisting of rubber puppets & the final creature being an actor in an unconvincing rubber suit (which is kept mostly in the dark to disguise its shortcomings).
Where the film tends to work best is as an account of life on an oil rig. The depiction of the rig's day-to-day lifestyle is authentic & elevates the film to watchable status. But while the film's setting is sound enough, the biology of the vicious hominid is all over the map – it is never clear as to how the creature can exist from an egg to an eel-like creature with teeth that bites a male victim, the victim becoming obsessed & raping a woman who then gives birth to the hominid (it is also never clear how the eggs can survive for untold millennia without dying). This seems to be the result of sloppy writing from Ed Waters. The climax with the creature is also lacking in impact but within perameters for the budget.
Present audiences might also notice that there is a distinct lack of gore or nudity on display here but that's because the film was made for television back in the early 1980s & was therefore subject to strict conditions. Which is the reason I won't mark the film down too low for not showing the goods.
The crew of the Zortron 101, an oil rig stationed off the coast of Antarctica & working 'off the books' in order to find a secret stash of oil, discover some small rocks that come up when the drill hits a depth of 19,000 feet. The rocks are then revealed to be some sort of eggs, which have been underground for untold millennia. When a crew member touches one of the eggs, he goes crazy & commits suicide by jumping overboard. The eggs hatch, revealing eel-like creatures that attack a worker before being killed by the rest of the crew. The victim is then driven to rape a female crewmember who gives birth to a hideous humanoid creature that then proceeds to massacre the crew.
The Intruder Within was a 1981 telepic that came hot on the heels of the classic ALIEN, indeed being one of the very first such knockoffs. The producers decided to set the film on an isolated oil rig off the Antarctic coast & make the monster a prehistoric creature.
Being an early-1980s telepic, The Intruder Within clearly doesn't have the budget to seriously compete with Alien, but that doesn't stop the director, Peter Carter, & crew from trying. And they give it a game try. The oil rig setting is unusual but it manages to work better for the film's limited budget. The visual effects are clearly primitive – consisting of rubber puppets & the final creature being an actor in an unconvincing rubber suit (which is kept mostly in the dark to disguise its shortcomings).
Where the film tends to work best is as an account of life on an oil rig. The depiction of the rig's day-to-day lifestyle is authentic & elevates the film to watchable status. But while the film's setting is sound enough, the biology of the vicious hominid is all over the map – it is never clear as to how the creature can exist from an egg to an eel-like creature with teeth that bites a male victim, the victim becoming obsessed & raping a woman who then gives birth to the hominid (it is also never clear how the eggs can survive for untold millennia without dying). This seems to be the result of sloppy writing from Ed Waters. The climax with the creature is also lacking in impact but within perameters for the budget.
Present audiences might also notice that there is a distinct lack of gore or nudity on display here but that's because the film was made for television back in the early 1980s & was therefore subject to strict conditions. Which is the reason I won't mark the film down too low for not showing the goods.