WITHIN THE ROCK
USA. 1996. Director/Screenplay - Gary J. Tunnicliffe, Producers - Stanley Isaacs, Scott McGinnis & Robert Patrick, Photography - Adam Kane, Music - Tony Fennell & Rod Gammons, Music Co-ordinator - Helen Gammons, Digital Effects Created by Eugene Jeoung, Additional Digital Effects - Post Modern Digital (Supervisor - Jim Tibbits), Spaceship CGI Effects - Corbitt Design, Battle Scarz Sequence Created and Designed by Nicholas Edgar, Special Effects Supervisor - Wayne Beauchamp, Creature Effects/Key Props - Image Animation International (Supervisor - Tunnicliffe), Production Design - Deborah Raymond & Dorian Vernacchio. Production Company - 360 entertainment/Le Monde Entertainment/Prism Pictures. Caroline Barclay (Dr Dana Shaw), Xander Berkeley (Ryan), Barbara Patrick (Samantha `Nuke-em' Rogers), Michael Zelniker (Archer), Bradford Tatum (Cody Harrison), Duane Whitaker (Potter), Brian Krause (Luke Harrison), Calvin Levels (Banton), Dale Dye (General Hurst), Earl Boen (Michael Isaacs)
Plot: In the year 2019 a moon, nicknamed Galileo's Child, is discovered heading on an impact course with the Earth. A team of spacefaring drillers are sent up to plant a nuclear warhead that will divert the moon's course. But during the course of the drilling the team uncover an alien tomb and unwittingly revive a creature that has been placed there by an alien people millennia ago and now starts slaughtering them.
`Within the Rock' is the directing and writing debut of Gary J. Tunnicliffe. Tunnicliffe is probably better known as a makeup effects supervisor at the Image Animation facility, being responsible for work on the likes of `Candyman', `Lord of Illusions' and `Blade'. Tunnicliffe makes a potentially interesting debut.
The film's premise seems to have been borrowed outright by this year's mega-budgeted `Armageddon'. There are an alarming number of similarities between the two films - in both films a group of roughnecks are landed on an astral body that is on a collision course with Earth in order to drill to its core and plant a nuke to divert its path. Of course the part of the story that `Armageddon' didn't borrow is the latter two-thirds where the film turns into yet another copy of `Alien'. But the similarities are enough to make one wonder. The set up in the first third is by far the better part of the film - the basic idea is established with a certain verisimilitude, the characters are given a certain degree of rounded depth over the usual faceless victims that fill most `Alien' clones and the discovery of the tomb has an appropriate sense of eeriness.
But unfortunately once its monster is unleashed the film travels down all too familiar grounds. It had sort of given the hope it might actually be a little bit more than a run through all the familiar cliches with its potentially interesting premise but the creature effects, the suspense set-ups and twists are all too familiar. And the film emerges as nothing more than another routine B-budget `Alien' copy. The plot never makes it too clear at times exactly how some of the plans to defeat the creature are supposed to work. There are also moments of plotting that are quite silly - like when an alien language in binary code is translated and instantly emerges as Old Testament English. The film has been made on a clear cut budget - we see little of the asteroid, we do see its explosion but never the ship landing on it. Nevertheless the film shows Tunnicliffe is capable of better things. Certainly the film is a better debut than Tunnicliffe's fellow Image Animation supervisor Bob Keen made the same year with the amazingly silly `Proteus'.
Copyright 1998 Richard Scheib
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