Merrick here...


As promised in yesterday's pseudo wrap-up, here's Copernicus..fresh from The Toronto International Film Festival...with the first in a string of titles he'll be writing about in detail.

Harry is the most depraved person I know. After all, he showed me
CHIRPY, which I'll never be able to erase from my brain. But
Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury are almost as sick and twisted,
judging from their pregnancy horror INSIDE (aka A L'INTERIEUR), which
closed out this year's TIFF as the last Midnight Madness.

You know what Chekhov says -- if you see a gun in the first act, it is
guaranteed to be used by the third. Well, INSIDE starts off with a
fetus. Actually, it is a pretty spectacular opening shot -- we see
the fetus inside the mother, and we hear what it hears -- a deep,
muffled voice saying something like, "Baby, I won't ever let you be
hurt." Then, wham -- the fetus is slammed and starts bleeding. The
shot moves outside the mother and we see that she and her husband have
just been in a car crash and they're covered in blood. Cut to:
sometime later -- Sarah (Alysson Paradis, sister to Vanessa) is so
megapregnant the doctors are going to induce labor the next day. But
they send her home for one more night of "quiet." Now back at home in
the evening, there is a knock. After some land shark style
negotiations, Sarah refuses to open the door. And it is a good thing,
because she'll soon learn this crazed woman (Beatrice Dalle) is
something of a scissor savant. She's doesn't have much in the way of
social skills, but she's a damn genius with shears.

The middle of the film is pretty standard for the genre -- confined
quarters, one person hellbent, one person thinking WTF, I'm in a
horror movie! Still it is done well, and the blood level is over the
top. Scissor nutbar finds her way inside, but every time she's about
to deal Sarah a fatal slash, she's distracted by another hapless
visitor whose life is about to be cut short. We get gut stabbings,
skull stabbings, neck stabbings, hand stabbings, scissor slashes, and
good old-fashioned scissor cutting. And often, victims are kind
enough to stumble around the house in their last moments on earth like
a mobile blood fountain.
As in every horror, there were a few times when I found myself
thinking "Why don't you just turn on the lights, climb out the window,
call the cops...", but in the end, we don't want the characters to do
the smart thing -- we want them to do the dumb thing! Carnage should
always trump sanity.

I won't say what ultimately happens, but the last act both takes the
already extravagant blood and gore level up another notch, and
deviates from the normal genre formula. People at the midnight
screening were screaming and cheering at every spurt. There were some
classic setups where the audience can see what is coming even though
the character can't. There were even some times when see what might be
coming, but then you think, well that is just too crazy, there is no
way... oh my god... oh my. I can't believe I just saw that.

This movie drilled so deeply into primal fear, it made my brain stem
hurt. They should show this in high school health class, because
you'll want no part in pregnancy after this. In fact, in some ways
the movie goes too far to be a mainstream horror success -- it isn't
just a slasher film, some truly horrifying things are done. The
directors, who where at the screening, seemed to be pessimistic about
it getting a theatrical release. Still, with its inventiveness, true
horror nature, and the relative novelty of a female killer, INSIDE is
guaranteed a serious cult following.

-Copernicus