Netflix And Chill: It's What's Inside (2024)

An ambitious feature debut from writer-director Greg Jardin, It's What's Inside is an interesting and unique concept that is well-executed, but ultimately suffers from the inherent difficulty of translating the material from page to screen. 

A group of friends get together for a big party, just before one of them is due to get married, and things get very interesting when one of the guests, Forbes (David Thompson), turns up with a device that can allow them all to swap bodies. He explains it as your mind being like a hard drive and this gadget simply being able to transfer the files. Everyone is freaked out, but then they start to figure out how they can have fun with it. Swapping everyone around, the aim is then for others to guess who is the real person inside the body that they are currently inhabiting. With me so far? Things are then complicated by resentments, scheming, and treachery, and it gets even more confusing when one or two people decide to lie about who they are while hidden away inside the body of someone else. 

If you read that paragraph and thought it seemed very complicated then you wouldn't be wrong. Jardin tries to help viewers keep track in two ways. First of all, everyone gets a photo pinned to them once they have been identified (although that is assuming that they actually ARE the person they claim to be). Second, scenes move between showing the external personalities conversing and then, with a different visual style, the peoeple inside those bodies. It's a tricky balance to maintain, and Jardin almost makes it work. There are two main flaws, sadly.

The biggest flaw is not having enough memorable characters in what ends up being an oversized group to keep track of. I understand that Jardin needed enough people to allow for the twists, turns, and playfulness of the material, but viewers don't spend enough time with most of the characters to more easily follow their journeys, aside from Forbes and the central duo of Shelby and Cyrus, who we first see having a tense time before they get ready to head to the party.

The second flaw is an avoidance of extra tics and signifiers. It's understandable that Jardin would keep away from these things, not wanting to make the film too simplistic and implausible (because it would be harder to believe that characters were being fooled if we ourselves weren't being fooled), but this needed to be slightly simplified. For example, there's a reason why "timeloop" movies always have main events that work as time-stamp markers, and this needed some device akin to that.

Things are paced well though, there's a wonderfully "disruptive event" just over the halfway mark and a surprisingly delicious and satisfying ending, and Thompson is a great presence. It's a shame that very few of the other cast members can match him. O'Grady is decent enough as Shelby, Morosini is amusingly whiny as Cyrus, and Reina Hardesty impresses in the role of Brooke, but that's about it. Gavin Leatherwood, Nina Bloomgarden, Alycia Debnam-Carey, and Devon Terrell all just make up the numbers. There's fun to be had with Madison Davenport, but she doesn't get nearly as much screentime as she deserves.

I definitely enjoyed this, and it's a film that may well improve on multiple viewings (when you know what to keep an eye out for), but it's a shame that some of the ambition, as admirable as it is, gets in the way of what could have been a more interesting and entertaining film.

6/10

If you have enjoyed this, or any other, review on the blog then do consider the following ways to show your appreciation. A subscription/follow costs nothing.
It also costs nothing to like/subscribe to the YouTube channel attached to the podcast I am part of - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCErkxBO0xds5qd_rhjFgDmA
Or you may have a couple of quid to throw at me, in Ko-fi form - https://ko-fi.com/kevinmatthews
Or Amazon is nice at this time of year - https://www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/Y1ZUCB13HLJD?ref_=wl_share

Black Christmas (2019)

So here's the thing, Black Christmas is a bad movie. It just is. Sorry for those about to rush to defend it, I am about to quantify my judgement very shortly.

The third incarnation, I believe, of this horror tale of a group of sorority sisters being stalked by a mad killer, Black Christmas both stands and falls due to the way the material has been turned into something different from both of the previous movies bearing the same name.

Imogen Poots plays Riley, a young woman attending a college that seems to be gaining a bit of a reputation for sexism and misogyny. There's even a petition to protest the teaching tools of one Professor Gelson (played by Cary Elwes). There are other characters, and other plot elements, but the only one worth bothering about is Riley, and viewers learn that she survived an assault in her recent past by a boy who went on to continue living his life without a care in the world.

Directed by Sophia Takal, who also co-wrote the thing with April Wolfe, this version of Black Christmas is a film designed to display the everyday battles that women have to be involved in, just to have their views acknowledged, to maintain/gain their rights, and to stay safe. It's a horror film reflecting the "me too" movement, and one that also ensures you remember how pathetic it is to have to state "not all men". There are moments when that works well, it's not subtle about it, but it's also depressingly not unbelievable. Then the third act happens, and everything goes horribly wrong. The explanation of events is absolutely terrible, like something written by a child who didn't know how to end their story, and the more straightforward horror sequences completely lack tension or thrills.

This would have been much better if it hadn't been marketed as a Black Christmas movie. Make it a socially-conscious horror movie. Better yet, remove the traditional horror element, and show how life as a female college student can still be a complete horror movie. Any attempts to incorporate familiar elements are completely mishandled, and just fall flat. You don't get terrifying phone calls, you get text messages from anonymous numbers. You don't get impressive kill scenes, you get what feels like a number of sanitised, bloodless, ones.

Poots is good in the lead role, and is at the centre of all of the best scenes (while the makers understand what they're doing), but even she can't do enough to improve the awful mess that drags everything down as the plot unfolds. Aleyse Shannon, Lily Donoghue, and Brittany O'Grady are a number of the sisters, with none of them really standing out (certainly not for the right reasons), and Caleb Eberhardt is a good guy proving that there are one or two around, and they don't stand up to shout "not all men". Elwes is given a role that feels right for him, so that works, but nobody else is worth mentioning.

Although made with a degree of technical competence, and although I have mentioned the good points that are made, particularly in the first half, Black Christmas still ends up being one of the worst mainstream horror movies of the past year or two. It's a step down from Takal's previous effort, Always Shine, and I hope she does something next that can help us forget this one. It's so inept that it made me think fondly of the Glen Morgan remake, and that's saying something.

3/10

https://ko-fi.com/kevinmatthews