Reviews
[REVIEW] My First Ever New French Extremity Film Was ‘Inside’ (2007)
Inside follows Sarah Scarangella (Alysson Paradis), a pregnant professional photographer who is still mourning the recent loss of her husband. On one unfortunate Christmas Eve, Sarah’s night is interrupted by an unknown woman (Béatrice Dalle). Not knowing who this woman is, Sarah refuses her entry. After taking a photo of this woman, and developing it, Sarah realizes she has a photo of this unknown woman from earlier in the day. Once Sarah thinks the woman is gone, she heads to bed. And that’s when all hell breaks loose. Bodies will drop, blood will flow, and babies will be birthed.
Over 10 years ago I saw my first New French Extremity film in college. I took a trip to the Family Video near my college apartment and scanned the aisles. It was the first time I was in charge of picking a movie for a movie night with some friends. Most of the people attending that evening were horror fans, so that’s the vibe I was going for. After walking around for about five minutes I saw it. The top left corner read DIMENSION EXTREME. The middle of the cover read INSIDE in thick red letter, right below that stated UNRATED. The image was someone grasping their pregnant stomach and a pair of sharp dirty scissors questionably close to her stomach. That’s the movie I picked. And that was the last time I was allowed to pick the movies for our movie nights.
Inside (2007) Plot Summary: Christmas Eve Home Invasion Horror
Inside follows Sarah Scarangella (Alysson Paradis), a pregnant professional photographer who is still mourning the recent loss of her husband. On one unfortunate Christmas Eve, Sarah’s night is interrupted by an unknown woman (Béatrice Dalle). Not knowing who this woman is, Sarah refuses her entry. After taking a photo of this woman, and developing it, Sarah realizes she has a photo of this unknown woman from earlier in the day. Once Sarah thinks the woman is gone, she heads to bed. And that’s when all hell breaks loose. Bodies will drop, blood will flow, and babies will be birthed.
Written by Alexandre Bustillo and directed by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, Inside would kick off an excellent career for these two French filmmakers. Brutal, sad, and one of the bloodiest films of all time, Inside is a film that needs to be seen to be believed. Like Calvaire, what makes Inside work so well, besides the tight script and great direction, is the pacing. Instead of a prolonged leadup to a barrage of violence and gore, Inside doles its violence out like a symphony. Each act perfectly leads into the next with the precision you don’t usually see in a debut feature film. The majority of the extreme violence happens to Sarah, which puts a lot of pressure on Alysson Paradis. Paradis sells her performance like Jordan Belfort selling a pen. Her responses are brutal and heartbreaking, while still being extremely grounded.
Practical Effects and Extreme Gore in Inside
The special effects makeup department is too vast to list and will eat up my entire word count, but words cannot describe how visceral the practical effects are. From the most minor cut from a mirror to the stairway scene, you can’t help but feel like you’re watching something you should not be watching.
If you haven’t seen the film then this next part will be a huge spoiler, but we need to talk about it. Bustillo’s script takes an unexpected turn toward the end of the film. We learn the reason La Femme is attacking Sarah is due to a car accident. Sarah caused a car accident that took the life of La Femme’s child, killing her unborn baby. La Femme wants Sarah’s baby as reparations. Towards the end of the film, one of the cops who was presumed dead (he was shot with a riot gun) wakes up. His vision is hindered by the riot gun causing him to accidentally attack Sarah instead of La Femme.
This attack breaks Sarah’s water, and La Femme kills the cop. Now, Sarah is on the stairs and her baby isn’t coming out–that’s where the scissors come back into play. La Femme has to perform a C-section on Sarah with the scissors, and it is, simply put, gnarly. The film ends with La Femme looking at Sarah’s dead body as she rocks the baby.
The Tragic Ambiguity of Inside’s Final Moments
This ending is beyond heartbreaking. La Femme’s character almost has a complete turnaround. It’s hard to tell if she’s crying because she has the baby or because she did end up killing Sarah. My personal belief is that it all became too real once she had to kill the cop. If the cop hadn’t broken her water and forced the birth, would La Femme have gone through with this at this point? It’s up to interpretation, but I believe La Femme had repented her actions by that point. That doesn’t make it any better, though.
Next to Martyrs, Inside has one of the most heartbreaking endings of any New French Extremity film. While it’s a difficult watch, it’s an excellent film to rewatch as a case study on how to write an antagonist. To boot, Sarah was La Femme’s antagonist. Sarah was the one who caused the termination of La Femme’s pregnancy–so in a way, this is a revenge film. Bustillo’s script pulls the rug out from all preconceived notions. We thought we were watching one film when in reality, we were being expertly misled by the person we thought was the narrator. It’s a bold move for a debut.
Bustillo and Maury After Inside: Legacy and Influence
Bustillo and Maury are still going strong in the genre. Their most recent film, The Soul Eater, recently had its premiere at Fantasia Fest. Like Inside, The Soul Eater was gory and violent, while focusing on an overall story that takes precedent. It’s impressive to see bits and pieces of Inside in The Soul Eater, while also adding all the bits and pieces of lessons they’ve learned over their six previous films. Inside is, to me, the best example of New French Extremity; it’s true stomach-churning, gut-wrenching, bloody as hell terror.
There are countless subgenres within subgenres for horror, and one that feels underutilized is workplace horror. Unless you’re one of the lucky few, most people wake up at some point during the day, go to work, and then come home. It’s one of the few things in life that’s nearly unavoidable. While there are countless real-life examples of workplace violence, seeing exaggerated forms of it in film can still be fun. When I pitched covering The Belko Experiment for this month, I actually thought I was pitching Joe Lynch’s Mayhem. I soon found out how incorrect I had been, but figured I’d go along with it anyway.
Mike Milch (John Gallagher Jr.) and 79 of his coworkers are locked inside the towering building they come to work in every day in Bogotá, Colombia. They’re given simple instructions: murder two coworkers within the next half hour. When they fail that task, coworkers’ heads start blowing up left and right. When they’re given the next task, kill 30 people in two hours, they take it…a little more seriously.
The Belko Experiment’s Brutal Premise Sets Up High Stakes
Written by James Gunn and directed by Wolf Creek creator Greg McLean, The Belko Experiment is a painfully by-the-numbers film that offers little more than a handful of entertaining kills. Its futile attempts at commentary regarding work/life balance or just how bad “faceless” upper management is fall so flat it’s comical. Nothing like multi-millionaire James Gunn telling me how awful it is to have to work a real job for a living. Great work. And its one-dimensional characters do little more than create a slight sigh of relief when they’re dispatched without regard.
A singular attempt at cleverness is broached from the beginning when we see a colony of ants in an ant farm on someone’s desk. Oh, look at that, these workers are nothing more than mindless ants! But any attempt at following that slightly clever idea is quickly thrown away. At one point, Barry Norris (Tony Goldwyn), the big boss in the office, attempts to group up who should and shouldn’t be killed; who has the most value outside of work. Gunn had the perfect opportunity to make Barry a deep and more sinister antagonist. If Barry had grouped people into sets from most to least profitable for the company, we would have something. It would show that Barry is a forward-thinking villain who is trying to suck up to the people who get paid even MORE than him!
Missed Opportunities for a Smarter Corporate Villain
I’ll do you one better. After all of that, what if the bad guys that Barry recruited to help him cull his subordinates realized they were just pawns in the game of Big Business? So then they attempt to repent by killing Barry in the hopes that they can find a common means of escape from this hell? Why is there zero attempt at making an interesting story other than this shitty, watered-down Battle Royale with people we don’t give a shit about? Instead of anything interesting, we’re just given a group of baddies who try to get into the security office’s gun safe. The only reason we’re slightly scared of the “bad guys” is because they’re bad guys.
The only slightly interesting performances we get are from David Dastmalchian and Adria Arjona, even if it might be a fluke. As someone who is a fan of Greg McLean and the Wolf Creek series, something just felt disconnected about nearly every aspect of The Belko Experiment. I’ve brought it up before that sometimes it’s okay to have a film that doesn’t tell a great story as long as the kills can carry some of the weight. But to say this film has a story is laughable, and that carries over to how flat this film looks.
Skip The Belko Experiment and Watch Mayhem Instead
It’s weird how sour this film left me. When I was watching it, I found myself grimacing at some of the kills. And I didn’t vehemently dislike it as much as this review would suggest. But as I sat there and thought longer, I just couldn’t wrap my head around what anyone sees in this. Mayhem is an all-around better film that tackles this same subject but in a much better way. So if you ever decide to sit down and watch The Belko Experiment, maybe go watch Mayhem on Shudder instead.
Would it be a month of coverage on Horror Press if I didn’t bring up at least one aughts film? I know the curator of all things Horror Press, James-Michael, is shaking his fists at the sky and cursing the fact that he approved me covering The Hitcher. Of all the remakes that were so pervasive throughout the aughts, The Hitcher is one that slipped completely under my radar. And that’s a damn shame. It wouldn’t be until I found a DVD copy at Bookoff that I finally got the opportunity to watch it. Hot damn, the critics really got it wrong here.
The Hitcher: A Road Trip Turned Nightmare
Jim Halsey (Zachary Knighton) and his girlfriend Grace Andrews (Sophia Bush) are on a road trip to Lake Havasu in Jim’s gorgeous Oldsmobile 442. An unfortunate run-in with a mysterious hitchhiker, John Ryder (Sean Bean), Jim and Grace find themselves in a fight for life and death. Only, John isn’t their only concern. With the 5-0 hot on their tails, Jim and Grace must escape from a psychopathic man with a death wish and the hot-tempered, hot-faced Lieutenant Esteridge (Neal McDonough). As the odometer grows, so does the body count.
The Hitcher is one of those remakes that does not have the approval of the original’s lead, Rutger Hauer. Which is astounding to me. Sure, the original is good. But it doesn’t set itself apart from the crowd too much. Rutger Hauer’s John is slightly more reserved, and while he has an edge to him, I don’t necessarily find him overly menacing. (Don’t kill me.) Sean Bean’s John Ryder, on the other hand, is furiously terrifying. There’s no question that there are tons of issues with the Platinum Dunes remake, though, for me, the pros significantly outweigh the cons.
Jim Halsey Falls Flat
The biggest issue is the character of Jim Halsey. I love how the roles of Jim and Grace are swapped from the original film. It brings an updated, modern edge to the film and is a great way to throw audiences who have seen the original. Though I can imagine the hyper-masculine fans of the original were not too happy with that. When it was decided to swap the roles of the characters, it seems like any character depth for Jim was thrown out of the window. I think Zachary Knighton is a wonderful actor who does the best with what he has, but he doesn’t have enough to work with. Writers Eric Red, Jake Wade Wall, and Eric Bernt updated the film with tons of epic scenarios and moments, while seemingly forgetting to make the supposed lead of the film interesting.
On top of cardboard Jim, the inciting police incident just feels very forced. Grace runs into a diner, covered in blood, after she and Jim found a family butchered by John. Someone from the diner calls the police, which leads to Jim and Grace being arrested and charged with murder. Whether or not that’s supposed to be commentary on rural police doesn’t matter because it completely fails to do anything other than forcibly push the story forward.
Besides that? I hate to say, but I don’t have many issues with The Hitcher.
Soundtrack and Atmosphere: A High-Octane Experience
First and foremost, The Hitcher’s soundtrack is incredible. We start the film with Move Along by The All-American Rejects. Talk about a shot of adrenaline. And the greatest needle drop in all of aughts horror history is Nine Inch Nails’s Closer during the film’s most wild car chase. It’s hard not to get lost in this film when the music kicks in.
What really sells this film is how intensely they handle the violence and the film’s gorgeous chase scenes. It’s no Death Proof, but these scenes are miles above the Fast movies that were out at this time. In a day and age where chase scenes are overly produced, badly edited, and just plain boring, The Hitcher manages to infuse horror and action in a way that probably won’t be seen again. Watching films like The Hitcher makes me sad for the state of modern cinema. The Hitcher wasn’t made to win scores of Oscars; it was made by people passionate about telling a badass, harrowing story (minus Jim). And they greatly excel at that.
The Hitcher Is a Misunderstood Cult Favorite
The Hitcher falls in line with my running theory of post-9/11 ultra violence. We were a nation scared of what happened, what was happening, and what seemed to be on the horizon–The Hitcher bottles that fear and anger, packaging it into a nasty piece of genre. Sean Bean and Sophia Bush are an on-screen match made in heaven. They wade through harsh lighting, thick film grain, and buckets of blood to deliver a film that critics and audiences unfairly panned. While audiences may have moved along, I sure didn’t. I want to exist in a world of nothing but aughts genre films, but am forced to live in a world of elevated horror. Le sigh.
