The Stranger Within - L'Inganno

What a waste of time. The beginning was pretty exciting, but the rest of the movie is so terrible! Amateuristic acting, bad directing and a bas plot. I was waiting for it to get good the whole time, but no such luck. Not worth the time!

The acting is wooden, the film recycles every dull horror cliché in the book, and the story makes no sense from beginning to end. The dialogue is completely implausible, and the only reason to watch this dog of a film is to laugh at its ineptitude. I would have no hesitation in including this film in a top ten of the worst I have seen in the past decade.

Well I actually did not require a doctor to realize The Stranger Within was going to be painful to watch. Why oh why do I continue to subject myself to films who are written and then directed by the same person. In this case the perpetrator is a guy named Adam Neutzky- Wuff. Adam's prior director experience is limited to television and I assume he must have thought this film would go direct to DVD which it obviously warranted to avoid a box office flop.

This so called thriller evolves around the married couple Psychiatrist Robert played by William Baldwin and his wife, who happens to play a stage and star actress named Emily, played by Estella Warren. Emily is such a great tortured soul that she tortured me while I waited for the movie to come to a resounding end, and the only sound I heard besides a terrible melodramatic soundtrack was the sound of another flop!

Emily has an affair with her best friend's lover, and shortly after Emily's best friend turns up dead. Poor poor Emily then gets kidnapped by a hooded stranger who subjects poor Emily to 5 days of rape and torture. The director Adam Neutzky-Wuff must know a few things about torture because that is what he subjects his audience in to watching.

Emily's husband Robert convinces her that they need to get away from all this trauma so they rent a beautiful villa with a great scenic and panoramic view (which happens to be the only reason I rated this a 3) to help Emily forget about her fear and the hallucinations she has been experiencing since the death of her best friend.

No thriller would be complete without an unexpected young and attractive damsel in distress appearing out of nowhere, seeking the assistance of the great Psychiatrist Robert to help her get over the so called accidental death of her husband who fell off the cliffs that overlook Robert and Emily's beautiful villa. The stranger within is actress Sarah Butler, who plays Sarah. Is this going to end up being a love triangle, or is there a murderer amongst the four occupants? Did I say four occupants, when only three have been introduced? That is because Emily's male friend Michael, played by Jeffrey Pierce just shows up whenever the director feels like adding him in to his script but doesn't explain why Michael just seems to disappear from the film after each of his brief scenes with Emily.

The ending could not come soon enough. As a child who places his hand to close to a heated element on the stove top, if you want to avoid getting burned as I did with The Stranger Within, then heed my rating of 3 out of 10.

To be honest, I only watched this flick due Sarah Butler who I was going to meet two days after seeing this flick. This is some kind of erotic thriller and not really a horror although the beginning do offer a bit of horror. But once Emily (Estella Warren) is rescued from her abductor she went off to an island with her husband Robert (William Baldwin) to take some rest but one night Sarah (Sarah Butler) appears covered in blood. Robert, being a psychiatrist decide to take her in at home. It's from that moment that the stranger is within the house but it's also a point were we do have a lot of blah blah and I can't say that the acting was convincing by Baldwin.

The horror comes back in when Emily is starting to hear a baby and is seeing the death body of a close friend Sophie (Katia Winter). Slowly we do start to know that Emily had an affair with Sophie's boyfriend. Yes indeed, Basic Instinct (1992) isn't far away. There's nudity from Estella Warren and from Sarah Butler (gratuitous when showing her titties) to satisfy the Kleenex boys.

Who's Sarah and why did she pops up and who's the kidnapper, that's the main question in this flick. But the magic from Basic Instinct isn't there. Therefor it moves to slowly and there isn't really any suspense. It's only the last 20 minutes that the horror (on a low base)comes back but by then it's a bit too late.

Gore 0/5 Nudity 0,5/5 Effects 0/5 Story 2,5/5 Comedy 0/5

We guessed it was going to be bad, but we were enjoying a tipple and wanted something lightweight to watch. Firstly the acting was appalling - two trees would have been more convincing. Then there's the direction - sudden glimpses of scary imaginary things - all the clichéd shock stuff that became annoying many decades ago.

Then we come to the script and the story-line. The whole set-up just would never have happened. We sat there laughing that - no, he wouldn't have done that and no, that bit makes no sense and why didn't she do such and such. Nonsensical from beginning to end.

Suffice it to say that it went downhill as it continued. The reason I didn't give it one star is that we got some entertainment value from picking every scene to pieces. Trying to think if I can say something good about it - nope, I can't.