Inside (A l'interieur)

I’m tired. I sleep too much. But in between my time spent sleeping and my time spent working, I watch an occasional movie or flick or film. I’m back on Netflix and they haven’t throttled me yet (which was the reason I quit them in the first place), so I get to review some obscure shit again. It turns out there’s this new dimension to Dimension Films, a sub-dimension of the Weinstein Co., called Dimension Extreme. For those of you not in the know, Dimension is a studio that released mostly horror films during the 90’s (the decade when the word extreme was used to describe anything and everything that was fucking cool). They brought us some extreme movies like Scream and From Dusk Till Dawn. Now we’re nearing the end of the 00’s and Dimension is still around, though their films have gotten considerably less extreme, unless you consider the potent extremeness of Mr. 3000 and Who’s Your Caddy?. That’s where Dimension Extreme comes in. If you want to see some crazy, cutting-edge horror, the most eXtreme horror available to human eyes, you rent movies that have the words Dimension Extreme emblazoned in white across a blood-red strip on the upper left corner of the DVD box. At least that’s what the marketing department for Dimension Extreme would have you think. BTW, I drive a Nissan Xterra, so I can validate any claims of extremeness, extremity, and extremepolation.

I’ve watched three Dimension Extreme films in the past few weeks: Diary of the Dead, Black Sheep, and Inside. I hated Diary of the Dead, which makes me sad, because I usually love zombie movies, especially zombie movies directed by George Romero. Diary is complete ass. I also hated Black Sheep. It is one of those horror-comedies that isn’t funny, isn’t scary, and is gory for the sake of gore (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing unless it involves sheep zombies). That brings me to Inside, the movie I am reviewing here. Inside is a French film which means that the actors speak French and the English translation of their words appears in sentences across the bottom of the screen. Or you can watch the dubbed version but dubbing hurts my epididymis. I don’t mind reading subtitles if there aren’t too many to distract me from the picture; there aren’t a lot of subtitles in this movie because there is a lot of screaming and crying and utterances of pain that don’t require translation. So…you shouldn’t avoid this movie just because it has subtitles. I’ll give you other reasons to avoid it.

Inside is about this pregnant girl who survives a car crash that kills her boyfriend. Her baby is okay. This presents a dilemma. She’s so sad about her boyfriend’s death that she doesn’t want to have the baby. She’s reluctantly going through with it. Oh, if you want to know who the actors or directors of this movie are, go to imdb and look them up. I don’t feel like incorporating their names into my review. I’m not sure why, I just don’t. Shut up about it. So the girl goes home to get some rest the night before she is going to be induced into labor. Her doctor agrees to pick her up the next morning at 6 am. She lives alone. It’s Christmas and it’s cold and raining. She knits. I felt a little sad for her. Then some creepy person knocks on her door, asking to use the phone. The person won’t go away and tries to get into the house. The pregnant woman calls the police. The shadowy intruder intrudes. Then the scissors and knitting needles and fireplace pokers come out, fucking stabbing and slicing and poking, blood spraying everywhere, gushing from neck wounds in arterial pulses, blood-painted walls, fucking eyeball-gouging bullshit, hands getting stabbed and nailed to walls (Blood Simple), heads exploding, aerosol flame-throwers to the face, fucking hair on fire, melting skin, fucking bullets and brain matter and gaping wounds, glass shards and CGI babies and shit, without the camera cutting away. Inside wins the award for the goriest movie of the year if there is a category for that shit. Holy fucking balls this movie is gory. It’s so gory that you may be desensitized by the time the absolutely disgusting finale arrives because you’re so used to all the blood and guts and carnage. The Frenchies at the helm of this ship probably sat around a table and decided to make the sickest movie they could possibly make. They outlined all the disgusting kills. The plot would be irrelevant. They said, “Let’s make a movie even bloodier than Haute Tension” (though they said it in French). They said, “What’s grosser than gross?” Good job…you succeeded. High fives all around. Go team.

Disclaimer: I made up the stuff about the intentions of the filmmakers. I watched part of the making-of featurette and they said they were making a “horror thriller”. They wanted to make something visually disturbing and they got this script and they went for it. Good for them.

I’ve seen some people on the internet compare this movie to Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible. Please don’t ever do that. Irreversible is disturbing; Inside is disgusting. There are some genuinely tense moments in this movie, but those happen before all the blood-letting. I didn’t care much about the characters or the plot, so the entire movie became a showcase for the gore effects team. They performed admirably (except for the torched head scene, I laughed at that). Give those kids a raise. Surprisingly, there are no exposed breasts in this, so if you thought that there’d be a lot of nudity in this just because it’s a French film, you are wrong. Besides, French films like to show the Cock’nBalls more than boobs anyway (I know you watch the IFC late at night).

Moral of this story: Don’t crash into pregnant ladies; their hormones will get out of whack.