The Stranger Within (1974)

Very Cool!!!

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Barbara Eden stars in this popular, well-regarded TV-movie written by Richard Matheson, expanding his own short story, about a well-heeled professor's wife who announces to her stunned husband that she's two months pregnant--this despite the fact her spouse had a vasectomy three years prior after she suffered a traumatic miscarriage. Eden admirably throws herself into this dramatic role (with its "Exorcist" underpinnings), but it isn't an attractive part for her. The pregnancy makes her disagreeable, uncontrollable, often on the verge of hysteria; she's also speaking in a foreign language, has become addicted to salt and coffee, and reads medical journals at an alarming rate. Director Lee Philips attempts to invest the movie with visual personality (chiming clocks, billowing curtains, a hand-held camera), but he cannot make up for the faults in Matheson's teleplay, which is exceedingly thin (not to mention derivative and anticlimactic). Technically, this is one of the better-made television movies of the 1970s, and the story is certainly involving, but it's eventually depressing and pointless instead of eerie.

TV-movies from the 70's are generally fantastic. Whenever I spot the "archive collection" label, or recognize certain names of contemporary writers/directors, I immediately associate the film with intelligent and absorbing plots, atmospheric tension, genuine frights and devoted performances from often underrated but talented actors and actresses. There's something inexplicably magical about these movies and not coincidentally I regularly encounter user comments around here from fellow film freaks that remember and honor certain 70 TV-titles as movies that haunted their dreams ever since childhood. "The Stranger Within" is such a modest but highly efficient and memorable little gem from that era. Perhaps the film owes its existence solely to the tremendous success of "Rosemary's Baby", but it nevertheless it still stands as a solid independent thriller about a handful of touchy subjects like pregnancy issues, marriage and faithfulness. Painter Ann Collins is overjoyed and optimistic when she finds out she's pregnant, even though she had to process a severe trauma 3 years earlier and her loving husband David underwent a vasectomy as a result of it. He can't be the father, but Ann swears she wasn't unfaithful, so they decide to keep the baby. Ann's condition rapidly turns out to be a very unusual, abnormal and even dangerous pregnancy. She puts tons of salt on her food and slurps down gallons of steaming hot black coffee. Even more disturbing is that Ann constantly seeks for cold, sneaks out for long and mysterious nightly excursions and that her body miraculously heals itself from every type of illness. David and his friends desperately look for a medical explanation while Ann isolates herself and increasingly becomes influenced by the unborn baby whose origin remains an enigma. "The Stranger Within" benefices from a powerful first half, with a strong emphasis on marital defiance. The tense interactions between Ann and David after finding out he couldn't have conceived the child are honest and realistic. The second half is more Sci-Fi orientated, but the atmosphere nonetheless remains vulnerable and serene. The movie doesn't feature and bloody massacres or monstrous creatures, but it's definitely unsettling and grim. The basic story comes from the multi-talented veteran author Richard Matheson, so there aren't many better references in the horror industry. I hugely appreciated the climax and the (very) open ending and caught myself still gazing at the screen even long after the end credits were finished.

Interesting made for TV ROSEMARY'S BABY/EXORCIST type flick, with Barbara Eden in fine form as the expectant mother who begins committing some very bizarre acts after she discovers she's pregnant. This is not at all new territory, though horror/sci-fi author Richard Matheson has managed to add some fairly effective offbeat touches.

Barbara is abducted and is now pregnant. Husband realizes that it could not be his child. Wife knows nothing about it except something wrong has happened. A frightful tale about a woman and the baby to come. Is it alien? or human?