Inside

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

I had been excited for this for a long time. It had been on my Netflix queue since it came out, and I was waiting for it to stop being a "long wait." All the reviews I had read were positive, some even gushing. Netflix gave it a very high recommendation. It's French, and those guys have been doing good stuff with the genre recently. Home invasion themed horror movies seem to be having a renaissance lately, with The Strangers and Them, and I am all for the return of that particular sub-genre. Inside even has a great, original hook: the victim is pregnant, and the intruder is a crazy lady who wants to steal her baby. That's some fucked up shit. I was primed.

This is very likely going to be my biggest disappointment of '08, at least in terms of horror movies. This sucked. Hard. I could leave it at that, but since I care about the genre so much, I'll try to dissect things a little more.

There were probably 3 ways this movie could have gone. It could have been a slower, moodier, "something in the dark is trying to get me" film. It could have gone for a gut-punch disturbing vibe. Or it could have been a crazy, no-holds barred, over-the-top gorefest. My guess is that they were going for the first 2, and ended up with some failed combination of all three.

It starts off slower, trying to build tension, but for me it just didn't work. This is difficult to criticize, because you can't always put your finger on it, but it wasn't working. Sometimes, you see a movie where a person walks around an empty house while something lurks in the shadows and eerie mood music plays, and it's suspenseful. Here, it was not. They try all the tricks.... long shots, people hiding in shadows, ambient noise. Just last month, The Strangers used these same ideas to good effect. This time, something about it doesn't work. They don't hit the right tone, or find the right look. I suspect it might have been shot on digital, because something seemed off. They tried to make it dark and moody, but instead it looked kinda flat and fuzzy.

This is the most violent horror movie I've seen in a long time. A lot of shit goes down here, and it's pretty over-the-top. Problem is, I think the filmmakers are aiming for disturbing violence, and instead it all comes off as ridiculous. I mean, you just can't take all these arterial sprays and exploding heads and vicious stabbings seriously, they are simply too flamboyant to believe. So then, hey, I love gore, maybe it could be some fun excess, except that the tone of the movie is too serious. So it's not disturbing and it's not absurdly fun... what is it? Maybe just gorenography? I tend to defend violent horror movies against charges of being torture porn, but since the violence here is not scary, disturbing or funny, I can only see it appealing to the kind of people who get off on violence.

I was expecting more of a one-on-one scenario, with a battle of wits between the two women, but the movie kinda becomes more of a slasher film. And this is where the movie starts becoming (unintentionally, I suspect) ridiculous. The body count is way higher than I would have imagined. A whole host of people start wandering into the house for one reason or another, and the killer wipes them out in various gruesome fashions. The victims include three cops, and in a film that strains all plausibility, I found it especially hard to take that some middle aged woman with a pair of scissors could pull this off. (I shouldn't go too far down this path, though. There's so many plot holes and implausibilities in Inside that I could give them their own post). The bodies stack up so high, and the story becomes so ludicrous, that any sense of realism is gone. Especially the part where the killer shoots one of the cops in the head with a stun gun (or something?) and then he wakes up later and goes batshit crazy and attacks the pregnant lady with his baton, like he somehow turned into one of George Romero's Crazies or a 28 Days Later or a The Signal or something.

I will say this: it gets so ridiculous by the end that I did kind of enjoy the last 10 minutes or so, at least as camp. And the final image, while not really earned in the dramatic/emotional sense, is cool. It's a woman with a burned off face, sitting in a rocking chair in darkened room, cradling a baby. That's some nightmarish shit.

But this ain't a positive assessment, so I ain't ending things on a positive note. Perhaps my biggest complaint with Inside is the blandness of the killer. And that's just nuts, because this should be a great character. There's so much potential to create a memorable villain, a woman intent on cutting out another woman's baby and stealing it, and really go to some dark psychological places. Have some intense back and forth with the victim. But instead the killer is blah, and spends most of the time grunting or yelling in anger, and not showing much personality. And she doesn't look creepy, just ugly. She's not scary so much as she is kind of annoying.

So, there it is. This had potential to be one of the best, most disturbing horror movies in a long time, and instead it's probably the worst I've seen this year. What a fuckin' shame.