HALLOWEEN HORRORFEST 2019: The Intruder Within (1981)

Our sponsor

Today our sponsor is Nicholas Kaufman, horror author and genuine Brooklyn Bonviant.  Nick’s most recent novel, 100 Fathoms Below (written with Steven L. Kent) is available now.  It’s got vampires on a submarine--how cool is that?

I have known Nicholas for literally years (there’s a poll we conducted for the Horror Writers Association that still plagues us to this day).  He is a good friend...which is why I am so puzzled that he chose for me this TV movie starring Chad Everett, Jennifer Warren and several Alien xenomorph plushies.

I referenced the Golden Age of TV Movies when discussing The Night Stalker earlier in this year’s Horrorthon.  This is a film that was made after that Golden Age.  And it. is. brutal.  This is the flipside of that Moxey/Matheson/Curtis production...it’s an unimaginative, poorly paced, badly photographed remake of Alien set on an offshore oil drilling rig, only worse than that sounds.  I kept picturing the people who would go on to make Leviathan and Deepstar Six eight years later watching this when it premiered on ABC and going, “Gosh, I have to be able to make something better than this.”

There’s this oil drilling rig, see, and Jake (Everett) is overseeing the operation when he is assigned a new superior, a mysterious geologist (Timothy Bottom).  The drilling uncovers what looks like a bunch of gray, prickle-covered tater tots and a xenomorph plushie which is shot by new arrival Colette Beaudroux (Jennifer Warren; we know she’s the female lead because she’s got a last name).  It seems those tater tots are...eggs?...that produce more of those plushies that proceed to infect workers on the rig, one of which rapes a female co-worker so she...transforms?...into a Fleshy Headed Monsta that chases Jake, Colette and Designated Minority Hire Mark (Rockne Tarkington, who was a character on the notoriously patronizing Banana Splits serial ‘Danger Island’) around and gets blowed up real good.

This is hands down the worst thing I’ve seen in the history of the Halloween Horrorfest, outpacing such candidates as last year’s Maletesta’s Carnival of Blood and The Car and this year’s The Blood Drinkers.  The difference between those films and this one was that the people behind those film might have been thinking they were trying to make a genuine movie; director Peter Carter and writer Ed Waters are just making something to fill a time slot on television back before the Age of Cable.  There seems to be no effort put into this thing.  Everyone seems to be sleepwalking through the story, going through the motions because literally there’s nothing there to engage them.

I could go on about the already mentioned poor special effect, the way the film claims to be very 80‘s (Bottoms literally tells Everett ‘this is the 80‘s’ in the first act) when it shows all evidence of being written in the 70‘s, the smarmy approach to women, the ‘transitionary,’ feather-haired zombie monsta that kills and/or rapes the other two women, the characterization that is so cardboard it would be charitable to call it one-dimensional, the annoying way Carter keeps slooooowly zooming in on people....but what’s the point?  It’s a joyless time waster  that isn’t even entertaining in its badness.  It’s not so bad it’s good; it’s so bad it’s unwatchable.

There is a moment when Harry The Feathered Hair Zombie Monsta (feathered hair is never a good look for Monstas) tosses a woman overboard, climbs a staircase, gives out a gusty Triumphant Monsta Roar...and then falls flat on his face.  If that’s not the film itself encapsulated in a single discreet image, I don’t know what it.  I do not recommend this film.  I do recommend we forget this film even existed and just move on.

Tomorrow’s sponsors are Jim and Theresa Moon, the Caretakers of The Great Library of Dreams and hosts of Hypnogoria, Microgoria, Commentary Club and other great podcasts.  It’s apparently Theresa’s birthday, and they’ve decided to memorialize this event by making me watch the classic George Romero/Stephen King tribute to EC Comics, 1982‘s Creepshow.  Jim knows I love horror portmanteau films, so this should be fun.

If you want to join Nicholas, Chauncey K. Robinson, the Soskas, and other great Horror Luminaries in getting me to watch a movie of your own choice during the Halloween Horrorfest, please consider joining the Domicile of Dread Patreon at the $3 Tier or greater.  Each new patron gets a free slot in this Gauntlet of Ghoulishness!  There are still three open slots, so act fast!