User Reviews

I saw this film once when I was younger, then recently had the chance to see it again. when I was a kid I actually enjoyed this film somehow. Now I just realise how bad the whole thing is, the characters, are terrible, the acting is poor but the whole thing is just funny to watch, you can't help but enjoy how terrible this film is. The plot jumps at times, and the editing doesn't help matters, much like the scene when they discuss the monster in their little base, the scene is so jumpy, one point their stood round a table talking, the next over to one side, the next back to the table, as if they couldn't turn the camera, maybe it was two different sets. And what was with the ending, the guy you think is dead, although we all know he isn't, jumps out at the last minute and attacks one his crew when they are in the middle of fighting the creature, it's a complete mess at that point. Still I enjoyed it for bringing back my childhood moment of seeing it for the first time. If you ever get the chance to watch, do! It's honestly not a good film, but you just enjoy how bad it is. So enjoy.

When the opening credits show outer space by using the Windows 95 starfield screensaver, you know you're not about to see DreamWorks level production quality or effects.

But ignoring the bad production quality, amateurish special effects, blatant disregard for the established laws of science, relativity, space, & gravity, and one of the most idiotic illogical endings ever, you can get a somewhat watchable 30 minutes or so from this. You just have to turn off your brain and throw out all reason & sensibility.

In the year 2019, a rogue moon is on a fatal collision course with Earth and Dr. Dana Shaw is leading the effort to stop it. She's already convinced the President that the best solution is to land on this space moon, drill tunnels, plant explosives, & force it to change its trajectory. She's met with opposition by a hard-nosed top military General who just wants to blow it up with nukes & missiles. During a brief meeting with him and Micheal Isaacs who is an ally, Dr. Shaw reminds the General that using nukes & missiles on it will cause it to rain Kansas size asteroid fragments upon the Earth thus destroying Earth and all life on it.

The General and Mr. Isaacs are never seen again in the rest of the movie.

Dr. Shaw joins a rag tag crew of space miners/drillers who have landed on this rogue moon that looks just like a giant meatball, have set up a special atmosphere generating barrier that produces oxygen, & who have already begun drilling the 3 tunnels that will have explosives put into them.

Because of this atmosphere barrier technology they are using, they are able to walk around in freezing cold space on this space moon without any spacesuits or helmets & breathe just like they would on Earth. They only use a face mask when drilling to block the flying dust. Big stretch but okay.

They are out drilling one day & drill/blast into a cavern that contains alien skeletons & artifacts scattered about the floor, has alien writing encased in platinum lining the walls, & has a fossilized alien creature embedded into the wall. The captain, who is a major sexist A-Hole horn dog, decides he'll take the platinum that's covering the walls as a bonus payment for him & his crew.

The next day while out repairing the atmosphere barrier generator, 2 of the crew are killed by a remarkably unscary generic alien monster. The generator is down so they now have to start wearing spacesuits outside in order to work & breathe. Hmmm who woulda thought!

However, they still don't wear full spacesuits that cover their entire head as the back is compeletly open & exposed to the space atmosphere. They should have been killed the second they stepped outside day one by getting instantly pressurized but okay.

The crew keeps going outside even after the first 2 get killed so one by one they get killed by the alien. Best kill goes to the explosive expert lady who gets attacked by the alien & while it's on top of her fighting her, she tries to shoot it with her explosive drillbit gun but ends up shooting herself in the head with it & drilling her brain. Talk about butter fingers.

The captain fights with the alien too & also ends up shooting himself with his own gun when his bullets ricochet off the hard alien armor skin & hit him right above his heart. In all other movies I've ever seen, that's an instant kill but ignoring the laws of relativity & science, the writer/director decides this doesn't kill the captain but instead he will resurface at the most inopportune time. Alrighty then!

The remaining crew including Dr. Dana Shaw decide to trap the alien using fire extinguishers (obviously) because they contain CO2 that the alien can't breathe & then will plant explosives & blow up the space moon (but isn't that what the General recommended from the beginning).

They were able to easily deduce that the alien was in hibernation but when they drilled into the cavern, it didn't come alive right away because they had introduced oxygen into the cavern from their atmosphere barrier generator. When the generator failed, the open cavern was filled with the regular atmosphere of the space moon & the alien was able to breathe it & come alive. Easy peasy explanation.

So after a few more deaths, they plant the explosives, fight the alien, fire extinguish it enough to get it caught in front of the large drill & just as they're ready to drill it to death, SURPRISE, the A-Hole should be dead captain pops up, attacks them but not the alien & gets killed. Remarkably, his fatal self-inflicted gunshot wound to the heart has disappeared & there's no sign of blood on him. He should have bled out 2 days ago! How tf is he still even alive!

The rest of the crew finally drill the alien to death, board the escape ship, & detonate the explosives blowing the space moon up. They watch a simulated computer scene that shows the fragments successfully changing course & missing Earth.

In the end, it wasn't a moon after all. The aliens who trapped the monster alien shot it out into space in a metal box & over time, rocks & debris attached to the box & formed the moon/asteroid/planet that the crew landed on. The giant meatball.

"Wait, What!" Moments: 1. They're in freezing cold crushing outer space on a space moon but they can walk around with no suits, no full head-covering space helmets, in short sleeves, & only a covid N95 face mask on their face to only block drilling dust!

2. The alien was fossilized & stuck in cave walls but it fully re-hydrated, grew thick armor skin, & came to life with just a gush of atmospheric wind!

3. In the end they decide to blow up the space moon but not to kill the alien because they had already killed it. Why didn't they just plant the explosives, leave & blow it up within the first 48 hours of arriving!

4. They were on a critical mission to save Earth from fatal collision but they only sent 7 people on such a vital mission!

5. The stupid captain shoots himself in the heart, lays outside on the ground for close to 30 minutes minimum but the alien doesn't finish him off! & the rest of the crew don't even go back to check on him or look for him on the security cameras (well that's understandable because they hated him)

6. The fatally shot captain comes back at the end to try to kill the remaining crew! Just why! Why was that a rational ending! That's not even a twist because it makes no sense, is quite irrelevant, & adds nothing to the plot or ending!

7. Why didn't they communicate with mission control EVER & especially once the schnitz started hitting the fan! It's like NASA cut them off & didn't even expect them to make it back. Not once did the crew try to contact NASA to let them know they were being killed off, that they had awakened & encountered a hostile alien, & that they no longer had a working atmosphere barrier generator! They weren't even communicating with NASA/home base to give them updated status reports on their drilling progress. That's definitely something you'd think NASA/Earth would want & need to know!

Summary: There's nothing to take from this movie. You won't root for the characters. Your imagination won't be transported through space. You'll find it darn near impossible to suspend belief on nearly every aspect of this. You'll side with the alien because you'll relish in the knocking off of the 2nd most idiotic space crew in cinema history (#1 idiotic space crew EVER - Life (2017)). You'll scratch your head profusely wondering why the writer/director even chose to set this in space but shoot it as if it were taking place on Earth in a cavern/mine. There was nothing indicating they were in space other than them telling you it was.

Few Similar Movies That Copied Aspects: Deep Impact (1998) - better Armageddon (1998) - worse, flat out stunk Mission to Mars (2000) - better Red Planet (2000) - better Space Cowboys (2000) - better Ghosts of Mars (2001) - better Life (2017) - about same level (but worse since it's much newer/recent)

Brian Krause from Sleepwalkers (1992) is in it. This is only 4 years after his hot lead role in Sleepwalkers but he's utilized like an extra in this.

Watch if you just like this type/plot of movie. Otherwise, you can avoid it & still live a fully productive & happy life without having missed anything.

Watch if you just like this type/plot of movie. Otherwise, you can avoid it & still live a fully productive & happy life without having missed anything.

It must be noted that I'm watching 'Within the Rock' on short notice, and with my eyes hanging out of their head, so I'm unprepared and susceptible to its unprotected onslaught.

A one-eyed Wraith ghost seems in distress as it does its best to contain an escaped Terror Dog with a flame and seals it in a Hellraiser puzzle box, which miraculously orbits its captivity somehow?

Claire Danes and a G-man, working for an earthly organization, discuss battle tactics on a planet billions of light years away.

Meanwhile, on Planet Somewhere, a man wearing a wetsuit with a receding hairline and what's-her-name from 'Million Dollar Baby' have 95 days to work with before Earth explodes. It's not explained why, but they have to drill on Planet Somewhere in paintball shooting Woodchuck masks.

One minute she's on Earth, one second later, and what's-her-name is on Planet Somewhere and is the new fish with the wetsuit fella.

What they're looking for to prevent Earth from exploding, I have no idea?

Tin Tin from that Eric Draven movie and Tom Green play a video game with Power Gloves.

Is that Steve O?

Not making any sense, this one who looks like either Claire Danes, Hilary Swank, or Martika actually resembles Eddy Redmayne in a wig.

This bearded guy looks like either Peter Jackson or Gunnar Hansen.

I'll be damned - this actor was in 'Pulp Fiction' down in the basement with The Gimp.

This is the second movie in a row that I've watched where all they've got to do in outer space is drill for unknown sources and use TNT to blow their way to riches. How this is supposed to help planet Earth is beyond me.

Obviously inspired by that beautiful big butterfly from 'Alien Resurrection,' a Hellraiser beast, mosiaced on a wall, takes form and talk about setting a cat among the pigeons.

Eddy Redmayne, in a wig, reduces some GI Jane to tears over lost memories and dead parents.

Can we hurry up to the part where the Hellraiser beast starts picking everyone off?

I don't know what they're drilling for, and I'm sick of them discussing extended working hours.

Was that Rawhead Rex?

Can I make an observation? Why are these twits doing it the hard way, by drilling manually for hours, when earlier the GI Jane soldier used TNT to blast her way through platinum steel?

I think the movie was about spacemen drilling for oil on an away planet, and some alien was accidentally defrosted and on the loose?

Of course, your customary Burke character wants to bring the beast back with them alive, thus creating conflict with the rest of the crew and resulting in a brawl at the end, while the Hellraiser beast is easily slain with drill bits and fire extinguishers.

And there you have it: 'Within the Rock' is a total waste of an hour and thirty minutes.

Think of what else you could be doing with that time.

Life's too short to waste it on this so-called entertainment.

And entertained I wasn't.

One point is warranted because there is an alien in it.

Let me preface...

I know this was a made for TV movie and, as such, one shouldn't have super high expectations. Though not all that original,the premise is a fun one, and has some potential to be tense and entertaining.

All I really wanted from this movie was Armageddon mixed with Alien. To it's credit, it tried (the tiniest bit) to toss in a few twists and ideas of it's own, but the plot just feels like a first draft that was written in a day then put on screen.

It's not the worst thing ever, but it certainly isn't good. The creature's design, though not awful, wasn't very interesting to me. Beyond that, whenever they tried to explain what it was or how it did what it did, it wasn't told very well and just didn't make any sense.

SPOILERS

So, the creature eats dead things. You with me so far? However, for some reason, I guess it will only eat dead things that it kills (the movie never says that) so the people on its original planet trapped it in a metal box and shot it into space with a warning/description about the creature written on its walls (the inside though).

This 1,000,000 year old warning is written in binary code that translates to perfect English by the way.

Obviously the monster is freed by the drill team that has come to redirect the moon the box is on from hitting the earth (but apperantly the moon formed around the box...I guess?) and starts picking off the crew one by one when it isn't getting knocked over or hit by things.

You obviously have the A hole character, only in it for the money, who tries to bail out and leave everyone for dead. However, at the climax (for some reason) he comes back to kill the remaining crew (why? I don't know...the movie doesn't care) and dies because he's an idiot.

Oh, and by the way, the monster is weak to drills. Guess this ancient civilization that could shoot a box INTO SPACE couldn't figure that out.

SPOILERS OVER

So, clearly I'm not a big fan of this movie. I love B movies, and monster movies. I'd just seen Peter Benchley's The Creature a few days earlier, and was very pleasantly surprised by it on all fronts so, just because Within The Rock is a TV movie, it shouldn't get a pass.

It's clear that the movie was made with as little time, money and effort as possible just to get a quick buck.

Even so, to its credit, the movie isn't too long and I was never super bored. Maybe with some friends late at night, you could get a few laughs out of it. Even for that, though, there are WAY More entertaining movies out there than this.

My recommendation, skip...

A huge asteroid is on it's way to smash the Earth, so a team of scientists and drillers is sent there to dig into the rock and blow it up from the inside. While digging they find a chamber with some sort of alien fossil inside. Of course eventually this fossil becomes alive and starts to maul the crew one by one.

This movie is basically a fusion of Alien and Armageddon (although not as good as either film, not even close).

It's an okay movie in the genre, although I will admit seeing it at a young age left an impression on me. The creature looks decent enough. Sadly there's nothing really redeeming about this movie. All the aspects are just.. generic. I think that's the best word to describe this movie. It has a few good scenes, but in the end it just doesn't wow you.

If you're a fan of movies like these, go ahead and watch it. Just don't expect a masterpiece.

My rating is 6/10