Owned version: The Retromedia/Bayview Entertainment DVD released in 2013.
Acquired: October 18th, 2016 from Amazon. (I also own a copy of the VHS which I bought on eBay before I found out this got a DVD release. I will likely never watch that tape as a result.)
Seen before?: No.
After the last couple longer pieces, it feels nice to get something I can basically blow off.
According to the back cover of the DVD, The Alien Within is "[...] a project undertaken by writer/director Ted Newsom... in which he would construct a new movie from the bones of an earlier film, Evil Spawn. In doing so, Newsom created a new universe of characters..."
Now allow me to translate this from box-copy hype to reality: The Alien Within is literally just Evil Spawn with twenty minutes of extra bullshit added into it. This extra bullshit is shot with an entirely different cast, so none of this interacts with the older film in any meaningful way. In fact, one of the rare times the story requires that the new cast actually come into contact with the old is when two investigators discover the body of John Carradine; while Carradine surely would have reprised his role had he not been dead for two years already, Newsom achieves the desired effect by cutting to a freeze-frame of Carradine with his head bowed into his chest. As a further twist of the knife, the new footage is video-shot where the original was film. Whatever, this is a garbage cash-grab of a film, akin to the old grindhouse trick of creating a new title and ad campaign for an old film in order to wring a few extra dollars out of it, and I'm not wasting any more time on it. I'll write a proper review when I get to Evil Spawn (which, hilariously, is included on this disc as a "special feature").
One small point of amusement: The cast in the new footage is expectedly terrible, and how could they not be? The majority of the new stuff is static scenes of people waiting in cars or in office buildings, observing things happening in another film or talking about the things that have happened and are going to happen. I did think it might be amusing to build a film like this, centered on and constructed around another film, and then never cut in the older film, just scene after scene of people talking about stuff that happened offscreen somewhere else. But I digress - the reason I brought up the cast is to offer praise to the one member who makes something of his role, the inexhaustible Richard Harrison. He alone seems comfortable with the assignment, finding ways to ham it up even when responding to nothing. Because of course he'd be good at this - as Godfrey Ho's favorite white guy, he spent much of the '80s emoting to material from other films, material where most times he didn't even know what the context would be. Now that's a damn professional. I feel like he would have killed in the modern greenscreen blockbuster era.
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