The Intruder Within (1981)

aka The Lucifer Rig

Jake Nevins (Chad Everett) is nominally heading up the drilling operations on an oil rig somewhere close to Antarctica. In truth, his company has sent in young geologist Scott (Joseph Bottoms) a couple of weeks after drilling started with instructions for Nevins to basically do whatever the guy says. What he says, while mostly locked away in cabin and makeshift lab, is to keep on drilling, as fast and as deep as possible.

That insistence on doing things the fastest way has turned out to be rather dangerous, obviously, making the roughnecks tired and accident-prone. Why, one of them even has prophetic (spoiler?) nightmares how they are all going to die. Things become even less great after a couple of replacement crew members – among them Colette Beaudroux (Jennifer Warren) who will be our co-lead of the day – have arrived. Some peculiar animal looking a lot like a low budget version of an Alien chestburster is coming up through the drilling, killing the guy with the death dreams, only to be dispatched by the quick-thinking Colette with a flare gun. There are also some small, egg-like objects coming up Scott is rather interested in, and before you can say, “uh oh”, the first member of the crew is infected with something nasty and begins to act rather aggressively and inhuman.

We all know where this is going, but at least, we do have a trio of competent working class people in form of Colette, Scott and roughneck Mark (Rockne Tarkington) to take care of business.

As far as “Alien, but on/in someplace else” movies go, Peter Carter’s (the director of the wonderful backwoods survival horror Rituals) ABC TV movie is a surprisingly fine film. Sure, the monster suit is a bit cheap, though it does still look rather creepy thanks to the well applied teachings of the skinned animal school of monster design, and the film does tend to cut away from things a non-TV movie would linger on for a bit, but it is a great example of how to get around these kinds of constrictions and get to the meat of the sub-genre one is working in.

If the effects budget doesn’t reach further than two rubber monsters and a suit neatly designed but still best seen from afar, then why not use a couple of actors looking pale and creepy and moving faster yet still stiffer than anybody else around them once they are biologically taken over? If you can’t show as much as a movie not made for TV, why not use the old route of shadows on the wall and implications, and make the handful of scenes when it’s affordable to show something count? Plus, in some moments, like the implied rape scene, the less is more approach does do the film a world of good, showing exactly as much as is necessary without leaving the borders of good taste behind. And even though one might argue that leaving the borders of good taste behind is one of the points of certain kinds of horror, it really isn’t one here. Rather, there’s the shadow of the aesthetic values (though not the complex thematic concerns) of something like a Val Lewton production at work here, which is a great aesthetic direction to take in a TV movie of the time this was made.

These more shadowy scenes (one of ‘em, the shadows on the wall birth scene, enhanced with Bava colours) work particularly well because they stand in direct contrast to Carter’s otherwise very naturalistic style. The outside scenes seem to be shot on a real oil rig, and the director is particularly apt at making this feel like a real, living workplace under rather extreme conditions, making the encroachment of the threat that will increasingly come by night particularly effective through contrast.

The Intruder Within really is a surprisingly effective little film that makes virtues out of all of its nominal weaknesses.

In short: Open House (1987)

Oh noes! Some crazy killer is slashing his way through the – preferably female – realtors of Los Angeles. But don’t worry, realtors of the world, the worst cop in town (Robert Miano), whose attitude is much further evolved than his competence, is on the case, doing diddly-squat but complain.

Things kinda-sorta start moving when radio psychologist David Kelley (Joseph Bottoms) gets involved in the investigation because one of his regular callers just might be the killer. Plus, Kelley’s girlfriend Lisa (Adrienne Barbeau) is a realtor, and whatever plot there is will get moving some time soon, right?

If you know Open House’s director Jag Mundhra at all, you probably know him as a purveyor of mildly up-market softcore smut (though he has some films in his filmography that aren’t), and even if I hadn’t known that before, watching this awkward attempt at mixing slasher and thriller tropes to mind-numbing effect would have suggested it. For this is very much a particularly lame softcore movie where many a scene is comparable to the pre-sex scenes of lame softcore with somewhat attractive, deeply untalented actors working their way up to a sex scene that then doesn’t arrive but is replaced by a bit of the old slasher violence. It kinda makes one miss breasts, particularly since the slashing and the stalking might be somewhat mean-spirited but are most definitely pretty damn boring. Turns out you need somewhat different talents for filming sex than for staging a thriller. My working theory is that Mundhra was initially planning to make a sex romp about realtors but had to change tacks half way through the production and just shoved half of a slasher script he found in a trashcan in.

Being a series of generally terrible scenes that end with the wrong kind of pay-off isn’t quite enough for Open House’s particular brand of dullness though. So, Mundhra fills the spaces between the sexless sex scenes with random scenes of Shapiro metaphorically scratching his ass (scenes of cops doing nothing while the audience has to watch being a special favourite of shitty horror films, as we all well know), various business about the Bottoms/Barbeau romance that is neither of import nor interesting to watch, a dire red herring plotline about Lisa’s evil low class (because of course this thing also has a nice line in being classist) competitor, and a lot of the usual stuff films include to avoid getting to their plot when they don’t have enough of it to fill a ninety minute slot. Some of this stuff may or may not be meant to be comical, but given the quality of the writing and the hackjob of the direction (what’s a transition?), it’s rather difficult to tell these things apart in this particular case.

It’s just as riveting as it sounds – not at all. While he’s at it, Mundhra also manages to get bad performances out of perfectly decent thespians like Barbeau and Bottoms, leaving this writer feeling rather shell-shocked by a film that combines all the issues of bad softcore and bad horror films without including any of their upsides; it’s not even bad in a way I could find myself amused by.