The Alien Within is set in the year 2020 when man has used almost all of his natural resources, we are trying to solve the problem with experimental undersea habitations, mining bases to you & me. One such facility is running behind schedule so Captain Jedidiah Pickett (Alex Hyde-White) demands everyone pulls their weight & the company who owns the facility has sent Catherine Harding (Melanie Shatner) along to try & offer suggestions about increasing productivity. The base receives a distress call from a similar Russian facility nearby, a team is sent to investigate. Once there they discover that most of the Russian crew are dead, having died from some sort of unknown virus according to Dr. Henry Lazarus (Roddy McDowall) & his robotic sidekick Brill (Emile Levisetti). They also find a surviving Russian (Tim Trevan) whom they take back to their base, along with a couple of the bodies. All is not well as the Russian kid has an extremely high metabolic rate & in some sort of fit a parasitic alien emerges from his mouth, an alien that has been perfectly preserved for millions of years underwater until the Russians unleashed it, it's also an alien that sucks it's victims dry of all their bodily fluids until the host body dies at which point it needs a new host...
Directed by Scott P. Levy The Alien Within is an OK sci-fi horror. The script by Rob Kerchner & Alex Simon is a total & utter rip-off of The Thing (1982), Alien (1979) & Aliens (1986) along with a bit of DeepStar Six (1989) & Leviathan (1989) thrown in for good measure. I borrows most heavily from The Thing, the unsuspecting crew inadvertently picking up a body hopping alien life-form who then disguises itself as members of the crew in it's bid for survival, the test to decide who is infected & who isn't, the sabotaging of the test, the accusation's, suspicions & arguments & the possibility that anyone might be infected. Basically The Alien Within is The Thing but on a much lower budget & set in the isolation of an underwater base rather than the Arctic, & even the underwater thing has been done before in DeepStar Six & Leviathan to name but two. There's a bit of Alien in here as well as the alien bursts out of it's victims & a bit of Aliens as there's a robot who has white 'blood' & even has the 'I cannot harm or allow to be harmed a human being' line just like Bishop in Aliens. So what it boils down to is that The Alien Within is probably the most unoriginal film I can remember seeing, having said that it moves along at a fair pace & isn't boring, it's still perfectly watchable in it's own low budget way & entertains to an extent but don't expect anything new. The ending is very predictable & as clichéd as the characters, ideas & themes in the Alien Within.
Director Levy isn't content with just stealing other films ideas & themes he steals actual footage, scenes from Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) & Lords of the Deep (1989) are indefensible proof. The whole thing has a really cheap & tacky look to it, The Alien Within obviously had very low production values. There's no real atmosphere, no scares & minimal gore, a few burned bodies, a brief autopsy & some aliens popping out of peoples mouths.
Technically The Alien Within is average at best, it looks very cheap although I doubt the filmmakers had a lot to work with. The acting wasn't great, Roddy McDowall probably needed rent money & yes Melanie Shatner is indeed the daughter of Captain Kirk himself William Shatner & it's nice to see her carrying on the family tradition of appearing in quality films.
The Alien Within is like watching almost every major sci-fi horror film from the past 30 odd years all jumbled together, only with much, much lower production values. Taken on it's own it moves along at a fair pace & is an OK watch, average at best. To add to his seemingly endless list of credits low budget maestro Roger Corman executive produced.
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