Entertainment

Frightfest 08: From Within

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This year’s Frightfest experience started with 3:10 to Yuma cinematographer Phedon Papamichael’s supernatural thriller. On a day that promised Swedish Vampires (Let The Right One In) and a film touted as “the most extreme film ever” (Martyrs), I had relatively low expectations for From Within.

Elizabeth Rice plays Lindsay, a teenager in a small religious town, with an alcoholic mother, and a bible bashing boyfriend. During the film’s first few moments, Lindsay is exposed to the suicide of a local goth girl, who in turn has just been covered in her boyfriend’s brain matter after shooting himself in the opening scene. It soon becomes apparent to the audience - albeit not the characters - that something is travelling from the last suicide victim’s body to whoever discovers it, causing them to be stalked by, and ultimately forced to take their own lives at the hand of a zombified mirror image of themselves.

The film soon reveals that suicide number one was the son of a local witch. A witch who just happens to have been burned alive by the town’s people after having a hand in the drowning of a popular member of the community. The town folk decide that it’s the witch’s remaining son, played by Sarah Connor Chronicle’s Thomas Dekker, who must be the cause of all the suicides. Queue predictable building of the town folk’s aggression, culminating in them all but taking up pitch forks and flaming torches, and invading Dekker’s home in the film’s final stages.

It’s the same kind of religious insanity which was so brilliantly expressed in Frank Darabont’s adaptation of The Mist, but in this film it feels unoriginal and uninvolving. I didn’t feel enough of an attachment to the protagonists to really care that they were about to be set upon by psychotic Christians.

If you’re a young teen looking for a slice of acceptable, light weight, inoffensive horror then this is probably for you. There’s very little real gore, and plenty of teen angst. Dekker is in full on emo mode, grunting his way though the film in a manner more annoying than anything I’ve seen him in before. He’s a crap John Connor, and he’s an even worse emo son of a witch.

Our teen heroine is clearly being forced into a religious belief that she perhaps doesn’t totally feel comfortable with and I’m sure that’s something with which younger viewers could identify. All the characters are so two dimensional and lacking in complexity that this just doesn’t feel like it was ever intended for grown ups.

The evil twins aren’t scary, there’s absolutely no tension thanks to telegraphed scares that you can see coming from a country mile, and there’s an ending that’s insultingly explained for any morons in the audience. Nothing is left to guesswork here. Papamichael might know how to get a great shot - although I wasn’t as impressed with the look of this particular film as certain other reviewers seem to be, which could be the result of the pretty awful print we were shown - but when given free reign to build up atmosphere as a director he fails very, very badly. After several scenes failed to provide any kind of tension, I started to lose interest.

I’ll admit that I liked the ultimate outcome of the film, and it’s not really in keeping with the light weight nature of what’s gone before. There’s also a comparatively nasty burning alive scene, which feels a little forced and seems to come out of nowhere. These positives are few though, and can’t redeem what’s gone before, sadly.

From Within also features one of the most unintentionally hilarious scenes in recent memory, as Thomas Dekker applies a curse suppressing waxy witchy goo to various parts of a fully clothed Elizabeth Rice’s anatomy. “Does everything need to be covered?” she asks. Dekker then uses the “Try not to sweat” line, which is, if I recall correctly, shamelessly nicked from Mimic.

There’s a kind of Final Destination vibe developing mid way through the film, but this is dispelled rapidly and doesn’t really go anywhere. With a director who better understands the genre, some extra meat on the anaemic bones of its characters, and some more imaginative kills, this could have been OK. As it is, this is really “my first horror film” territory.

© 2008 Is there food?.