At the time of its release I somehow convinced myself that I loved this thing because every other some bitch on the horror and NerdSpace sites wanted to mate with it and marry it in Second Life. So I bullied my friends into watching it and saying that they loved it as much as I had duped myself into thinking that I did, and maybe some of them genuinely did love it that much but I doubt it, and so I am here today to wash away my inequity and cleanse my sins by saying that maybe I was wrong to convince myself and others of the merits of this film because quite frankly it isn't very good at all and I didn't really enjoy re-watching it and honestly didn't really enjoy watching it in the first place to begin with.
What this film is all about is that it is one of the Big Four imports of The French New Wave Order that knocked critics and audiences on their fat asses between the year of our lord 2003 and the other year of our lord 2008. And just like the other Big Four that had names like Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax and Megadeth, The French Big Four of The French New Wave Order (fuck you I will not abbreviate it no way, no how) had names like Haute Tension (review forthcoming, I actually loved the ending, go fuck yourself), Frontiere(s) (a total piece of (s)hit), Inside (AKA A l'interieur, AKA the film whose review you are currently reading, AKA the film that you have been lying to yourself and your loved ones about for years now but I am here to say that this shit stops right here. We're in this together, friends. It's you and me. Brothers and/or sisters in arms and law and the law states that we must man the fuck up and admit that we do not now, nor have we ever, really liked this film more than as a relatively harmless distraction or as a not-too-bad alternative to other more enjoyable home invasion flicks that we have never described as being the second coming of cinematic horrors) and then of course there is Martyrs which is pretty good in parts but overall only okay and also I'm not sure if I would even consider it to be a horror movie anyway. Or maybe I do. Who knows. The point is is that I wasn't scared or disturbed by it, is all I'm saying.
Funnily enough, I was also neither scared nor disturbed by Dimension Films EXTREME presents: Inside.
Pretty much the first thing you're gonna see in this flick is a shitty looking CGI baby, floating around in amniotic fluid and being soothed by a disembodied voice (we're guessing it belongs to its mother) before some shit goes down and the poor little weird cartoony looking balloon thing is suffering in-utero trauma and who knows what else. It turns out that the disembodied voice did belong to baby mama, only she has just been involved in a head-on collision and it looks like the male passenger in her car, who we assume is her husband, is not gonna make it and from the looks of things neither will the occupants of car #2. It's also raining. And the pregnant driver, and let's just use her actual character name from now on which is Sarah by the way, is pretty badly smashed up in the face department. All in all this is pretty much the opposite of that Ice Cube song about it being a good day or some such thing. Her windscreen wipers appear to still be in working order so, you know, silver linings etc.
Soon, it will be Four Months Later but first we're treated to a reasonably stylish credit sequence of blood washing down surfaces and ultrasound babies and ominous music and you are informed that the film is starring Beatrice Dalle (Betty Blue, Trouble Every Day, Dimension Films EXTREME presents: Inside AKA the film that I was watching when I wrote this review) and it is additionally also starring Alysson Paradis (sister of Vanessa Paradis, aunt of Vanessa's and Johnny Depp's children Lily-Rose (b. 1999) and Jack (b.2002), Date of Birth: 1982, France) and then some other stuff happens and then...
Four Months Later (for real): And Sarah is one day away from delivering her baby. Her OBGYN is checking up on her and, I might be wrong, but Sarah doesn't look too thrilled to be there and/or be pregnant. Just something about the disgusted way she wipes away the ultrasound jelly after the examination. Anyway, it could just be me. After she leaves the doctor's office there is a funny scene where a munted old nurse takes a seat next to Sarah and lights up a cigarette and starts going on and on about all the ways in which the birth of her own baby was so fucking painful inferring, of course, that Sarah's delivery will be equally as unpleasant. And then Sarah calls her a twat and it's a funny scene on its own and also if you've seen the film then you know that when her baby is eventually born the delivery does suck in a way that could be regarded as reasonably painful. Also, it is Christmas Eve so that means that Sarah Jr will be a Christmas miracle birth or something but more importantly it means that this movie will be a Christmas Home Invasion (CHI) flick very much like Black Christmas except for all the ways in which it isn't.
Some other shit happens involving her mother and then her employer but we're all thinking "Just get the fuck home already so all the invading can start" and so she does. But before anything EXTREMEly happens where invading is concerned, something moderately crazy happens where a nightmare about giving birth through one's mouth is concerned. It's a goofy fucking scene with all the milk vomiting and bad CGI and everything else. I had forgotten about it from the last time I watched it but I didn't want to forget about it again so I wrote it down this time. That was an award winning sentence right there.
So eventually Beatrice Dalle shows up at the front door knowing that Sarah's husband is dead and also that her name is Sarah and as a deterrent Sarah takes some photos of The Lady (officially listed in the credits as La Femme which is French for something or other) and calls the police and then develops the photos and then moves to the couch to watch some TV. I'm pretty sure in that order. And when she's watching TV on the couch there is a bit where you can see The Femme in the shadows in the background being all creepy etc but I don't really understand why because Sarah can't see her or know that she's there so she is really only being creepy for the benefit of the viewers and possibly herself. I developed a theory while watching The Strangers (I think we can all agree that we never want to watch that one again so let's just hug it out and move on) that roughly 50% of scare scenes in horror movies, particularly home invasion movies, exist solely for the audience's benefit but in no way affect or impact the protagonists in the film. And they also don't make any sense. Like when Liv Tyler is crawling across the field or some shit (I don't really remember) and one of The Strangers is kind of creeping up behind her and then when Liv Tyler turns around The Stranger is gone? I don't understand why they would do that. Liv Tyler doesn't know for sure that The Stranger is there, and when she turns around to check to make sure, The Stranger has vanished. I guess it's similar to those weirdo's who stand in the bushes outside of peoples' (let's be honest, mostly girls') houses, hate-wanking furiously into a fistful of stolen clothes pegs and hiding from passing cars and whatnot or what about those freaks who keep journals? Am I right? Deep down, these people want to be caught. That's the psychology I have heard about anyway. But have you ever seen a movie where some suspenseful shit was happening behind the protagonists back and when they turned to check it out the suspenseful shit was still happening? No. You haven't. Not even in the movie The Happening. Because the object of suspense has either disappeared or turned into a cat or something. Maybe if the point of view shifted to that of the antagonist. That happens sometimes. That kinda works. The point is that The Strangers was a stupid fucking film. The first half was okay I guess but seriously, if you ever watch it again (and I think that we have both agreed that you won't) count how many times a stranger appears behind someone and then disappears before they notice them. Certain people who are more irresponsible than me would have exchanged "count how many times" with "take a drink whenever" but I am not going to use these reviews as a platform to endorse binge drinking. Anyway, I don't really know what I'm talking about but once I noticed this phenomenon I couldn't un-notice it so these cheap and lazy scare tactics just piss me off whenever they occur which is all the fucking time in pretty much every horror movie released these days.
Once Sarah falls asleep, La Lady makes her way through the house and I like this scene with its no dialogue and its easygoing manner. These are the moments in which the film works best, when it has the kind of look and feel of a dark, melancholic fairy tale. With scissors. And there is a great shared moment where Dalle tenderly prepares Paradis before cutting into her stomach trying to get her damn baby out and then the whole scene explodes into typical spaz-horror bullshit with its post-cutting and frame-skipping and stings on the soundtrack. Speaking of which, in the same way that camera movements do not require sound effects, violent gore effects do not require the reinforcement of high-pitched squeals to sell their brutality. A slide-whistle, maybe, but never a high-pitched squeal. None of this is as bad as the shit you would find in Saw 1-3D but, hey, this is considered by many (myself not included) to be a modern classic. The Saw Trilogy+The Saw Trilogy+Saw 3D are considered by many (myself very much included) to suck dicks in hell. I should in no way have to justify any of this shit as being acceptable based solely on the fact that it isn't quite as bad as the epileptic cinematics of the fucking Saw franchise. If it was just this one scene that resorted to this kind of bullshit I would have let it go but it wasn't and so I won't.
Take, for example, the scene where La Femme Nicotina gets all twitchy while smoking a cigarette. Sure, she's unhinged. I get it. But so what. Don't rub your edgy fucking editing techniques in my goddamn face. It's cheap and obvious and means that you don't have to rely on the strength of the writing or performances to sell an emotional concept as long as shit can get crazy in post. In its defence, the majority of the film, at least for the first 2/3, is cut pretty classically whenever there is nothing too insane going on but, seriously, why drop a technique that is so obviously working for you to adopt one that so obviously fucking sucks. These aren't action movies, so please don't treat them as such. Jesus, even action movies aren't action movies anymore.
(note to self - try to recall conversation that I had many months ago in which I argued that modern horror films and modern action films are becoming borderline interchangeable)
Soooooooo, Sarah is able to get away and into the bathroom and The Lady loses her shit and stabs at the walls and stuff and then there is a knock on the front door.
It just occurred to me that if The Lady had simply bound and gagged Sarah when she was asleep then none of this other shit would have ever happened. "But then there would be no film, dummy!" I know, I know. But I fucking hate that reasoning. Maybe if the characters in a film have to act like such fucking idiots just for the film to exist and sustain a feature length and for the story to progress for longer than five minutes then maybe the film shouldn't be made in the first place. No, that's harsh. Sketchy character motivations are de rigueur for horror films, and in many instances fake movie human beings in fake movie peril acting like real movie assholes doesn't bother me. But when a horror movie like this one comes along being all solemn and pouty and behaving like a slightly more high-brow and absolutely definitely more subtitled horror film than your average F13 knock off then maybe it is valid for guys like us (or, failing that, guys like me or, more accurately, literally, the guy who is me) to expect something a little more honest and believable when it comes to the characters and events in the goddamn film. This extends to the violence as well but we'll get to that later.
From this point onwards DFE presents: Inside becomes a revolving door of victims who are swiftly and violently dispatched followed by periods of down-time in which Dalle and Paradis yell at each other from either side of a door. The film is absolutely more fun and stylish than I have just made it sound, but not by much, and it is also far more ridiculous.
this is as far as i got. but the thing i wanna say about the violence in this thing and other EXTREME horror movies is - what is with the rarity of defensive wounds? take, for example, the scene in INSIDE where Dalle dick stabs the fuck out of some dude. lots of shots of him screaming, lots of close-up insert shots of his dick getting stabbed, but at no point does he make any attempt whatsoever to fight his attacker off. this shit happens in movies ALL THE TIME and it drives me nuts (which is a dick pun). just another one of those things that once you notice it you can't un-notice it.
man, it's been seven years - maybe i should re-re-rewatch it and write a whole new review. and actually finish it this time. nah fuck it.
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