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People are voting emotionally.

Better Late Then Never

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

It's pretty obvious that "The Stranger Within" is sort of a "Rosemary's Baby" knockoff with a few tweaks here and there. The big surprise to us viewers is that sweet, cute Barbara Eden CAN look terrifying (check out some of the faces that she makes). The movie itself was mostly what I expected.Now here's something else. This marks the second time that an "I Dream of Jeannie" cast member has had a brush with a mysterious pregnancy in a movie. Emmaline Henry, who played Amanda Bellows on the show, played a supporting role in "Rosemary's Baby". In fact, the men on the show also appeared in apocalyptic movies: Larry Hagman (Maj. Nelson) co-starred in "Fail-Safe" (a weaker version of "Dr. Strangelove"), and Hayden Rorke (Dr. Bellows) co-starred in "When Worlds Collide" (about an object on a collision course with Earth).So, it's not a great movie, but I liked it.

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.

Although her sweet, caring schoolteacher husband David (the fine George Grizzard) had a vasectomy three years ago, successful painter Ann Collins (marvelously played with meticulous focus by the lovely Barbara Eden of "I Dream of Jeannie" fame) has somehow managed to become pregnant. Even weirder than Ann miraculously having a bun in the oven is the radical shift in her once normal, now increasingly flipped-out behavior: Ann starts putting way too much salt on her food, gulps down steaming hot black coffee by the gallon, develops a peculiar predilection for freezing cold temperatures, reads sociology books by the dozens, starts talking in an odd unidentifiable foreign tongue, and becomes cranky to the point of being downright hostile. Is Ann going crazy? Or, more disturbing, is the rapidly developing fetus she's carrying some kind of alien creature with potentially malevolent intentions? This frightfully effective and absorbing made-for-TV domestic sci-fi/horror hybrid mixes elements of "Rosemary's Baby," "The Exorcist" and "The Stepford Wives" into a highly creepy and compelling synthesis, cleverly mining a fine line in flesh-crawling thrills from its quietly unnerving central theme: The placid tranquility of a bland, everyday, affluent upper middle-class suburbanite setting gets totally ripped asunder by inexplicable otherworldly occurrences which defy logical categorization and hence can be neither controlled nor comprehended through ordinary means. Lee Philips' low-key, rather pedestrian direction inadvertently works in the film's favor; his lack of flashy cinematic flourishes and pretty mundane style greatly enhance the movie's vivid and convincing evocation of a plain, average, nothing fancy or unusual environment. Richard ("Duel," "The Night Stalker") Matheson's script is typically sound: intelligent, insightful, mature (e.g., when David first finds out about Ann's condition he accuses her of being unfaithful), mysterious and paranoid, with the fantastic premise made believable and intriguing by grounding it with acutely observed, true-to-life, three-dimensional characters and an uneasy tone which remains pleasingly enigmatic and ambiguous to the very end. Eden and Grizzard are excellent in the leads, making for a thoroughly plausible and appealing middle-aged couple. David Doyle as a kindly, helpful amateur hypnotist, Nehemiah Persoff as a bewildered doctor, and Joyce Van Patten as Ann's concerned, sympathetic best friend contribute sturdy supporting performances. The surprise conclusion with the baby's actual origins finally being revealed packs a socko startling punch. Eerie, understated and above all proficiently done, this nifty chiller diller rates as a serenely unsettling little scarefest.

This movie has many things going for it. All the best ingredients are here: a great story with a fine cast and writers. I was amazed to find that nearly all of these actors--as well as the director and writer who created the story--were veterans of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone. I was lead to expect the finest in performing art from this movie. Unfortunately, the acting in this movie is its most glaring weakness. Barbara Eden is probably miscast in the leading role. She captures all the moodiness and unpredictability that one would expect of a pregnant woman. The key to understanding what is happening to her character is the explanation of what happened to produce this strange pregnancy. All we get is her strange behavior and a few hints from the actors that point us in the right direction. Those hints, when provided by the actors themselves, are usually a bad sign. But even they are not as bad as the acting itself. Barbara Eden says too little in the leading role and the other actors compensate by overacting their parts--all presumably in an attempt to produce suspense. They would have done well to take a page from Rod Serling's school of acting: namely, that it is what is left unsaid and undone that holds the audience in suspense. The more words that are put in the actors' mouths, the more actions there are for them to perform, the more tedious and incredible the story seems.This is nowhere better illustrated than in a scene where Barbara Eden's character is behaving especially irrationally. All of the other characters are behaving equally irrationally, and this only amplifies the confusion and suspense produced by Ms. Eden's character. David Doyle, who plays a hypnotist, shouts above the din, "Just let her act out what she feels compelled to do and maybe we can find out what's going on here!" Amen to that!! His is the voice of rationality in the picture.Bad acting aside, on a positive note, "The Stranger Within" is a compelling story that seeing the movie compels me to read. The movie's and I'm sure the story's presentation hearken back to a time before special effects and sardonic humor: a time when much was left to the viewer's and reader's imagination. Imagination produces the most creative kind of viewing and reading. It's just too bad that in this case the director felt that he needed to supply so many details that were unnecessary to his purpose. A great concept here, but Mr. Serling would no doubt be disappointed.