The Horror Show
It Lives Inside
by Jeff Hall and Sean Bingham
As happy as I was while watching the film I reviewed this round, Bethany, is about how angry I was watching whatever this movie was supposed to be.
It Lives Inside was terrible. I mean absolute dreck. It is taking every ounce of my being not to just end the review there or just making this a list of everything that is wrong with this movie. Let's start off with the one thing that they got sort of right: the story. I say sort of right because the more I think about it, the story isn't very well presented. There are some unanswered questions.
First off, they open with a sepia toned flashback to 1890. This is where we see our first giant mistake. They used the papyrus font for both the date and when we fast forward to present day. There are certain fonts you shouldn't use if you want to be taken seriously and this is like number two on the list, but I digress. In 1890 there was a blacksmith who said some magic words and got possessed by CG smoke. He kills all the villagers and eats some of them… I think. It was a lot of crazy shoved in my face. He then kills himself and we are whisked off to present day.
We meet, well, they don't have names. That's right, the main characters don't have names. Somebody thought this would be clever except everyone else has names and it just feels like you forgot to name your main characters. The Man and The Woman are married and have an annoying offspring named Caleb. Man gets hurt and can't work. Woman gets a job with her shrill mother. Man starts to see CG smoke. Man fights with the weird neighbor over his dog. Man constantly fights with Woman. Caleb screams and cries. The dog gets killed. The neighbor goes missing. More fighting between Man and Woman. Woman leaves with Caleb. Man drinks, gets attacked by a CG devil smoke monster. Turns out Man has killed everyone. Man hangs himself. THE CIRCLE IS COMPLETE.
I can't even begin to tell you how bad I just want my 90 minutes back. I've seen better acting in high school performances of one act plays. The chemistry between Man and Woman was non-existent. The effects were like Video Toaster effects. The sound was so bad. It sounded so tinny at times. Did no one on this crew know how to do ADR? This was so pedestrian. I've seen better student films.
I caught myself arguing with this movie. I also caught myself wondering if they found that brown paint that was used on every single wall in the house on sale or did it belong to one of the crew's uncles and he let them have it for like twenty bucks. I know that sounds petty, but I could not focus on the story so my attention went to the horrible background. They also let that baby crawl around on a very dirty carpet. I was so afraid that the baby was going to put something in its mouth.
The kicker to all of this, there wasn’t even an IMDB page for this mess when I first wrote this review so this might have just been a fever dream.
HMS received an advanced screener of this film in exchange for review. It Lives Inside will be released August 7 on VOD and September 4 on DVD.
Robin Thompson, HMS
The Horror Show Menu.