INTRUDER WITHIN – The seventies and eighties are thought of as the golden age of the horror film, but what about TV horror? There’s a roll call of indisputable goodies from the time, the likes of ‘Something Evil’, 'Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark’ etc etc The supernatural was always very much a stock-in-trade, but, present company excepted, I’m not aware of there being many TV ‘Alien’ rip-offs. ‘Intruder Within’ therefore enters the scene with a bit of novelty up its sleeve… what about the rest of its hand? It’s set on an oil rig, a nicely grimy location that covers the ‘hemmed in, dark corridors and no obvious means of escape’ bases all at once. There’s an attempt at paranoia, divisions within the team and so forth, and the requisite unusual life-form, this time dredged up from the depths of the ocean, that will infect crew members one by one and eventually mutate into a fully grown guy in a monster suit in the final reel so that the punters get their license fee’s worth. Unfortunately, it’s lumbered with a total style deficit. Whereas the makers of ‘Alien’ had clearly absorbed the era’s cinematic cutting edge and knew how to make the same moves, ‘Intruder Within’ looks like it belongs on old TV – stiff cinematography, stilted acting, step after step a conventional plod. There’s even a romance between a rugged oil dude and someone who’s pretty but assertive. I like ‘Alien’ clones as much as the next geek, in fact I prefer some of them to the real thing, but that’s usually because they do something excruciatingly bad or weird; ‘Intruder Within’ is just palatable really, maybe the sort of thing you could put your feet up to forty odd years ago, maybe less so now (although I do get the nostalgia value when looking at bygone TV). Maybe a fairer comparison would be to stick it alongside another seafaring Alien rip such as ‘Deep Rising’ instead, but it would still lose out.
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