Absolutely Fantastic

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

"From Within" follows a small town plagued by an evil curse which drives people to kill themselves, then pass it on to the next victim. This story would be an uphill battle for most film makers, since the on- screen deaths lack any visual punch or visceral horror. The "Evil Dead" remake made us afraid we would soon be carving our own faces off; this movie's "suicide tag" is more risible than the deaths in "The Happening." Killing oneself is not innately scary unless you can make it look like it HURTS. Here the director's lack of budget and lack of imagination make the great evil of the story a repetitive mess.It turns out that the evil was unleashed by the pastor of a local mega- church, and this is where the movie really goes off the rails. The Christians in this movie are a band of straw men and stereotypes used exclusively for venting the writer's anti-Christian bile, and the film suffers for the sermon. The Witches in the tale are treated with reverence, their persecution a horrible crime highlighting the hypocrisy of the church. Why exactly is prayer nonsense, but a teenager drawing circles on your arms and chest a reliable defense against evil? The one bright spot is the montage of suicides played over the end credits, which is presented in an eerie and skilled manner. For this viewer it's too little, too late. I cannot imagine any scenario in which I would watch this movie a second time.

Being a devout Horror fan as well as an easy grader, I usually look for explanations regarding my own personal taste whenever I don't enjoy a Horror film. In From Within's case, I'm not sure if I've seen too many Horror films, or too few... I just know I didn't enjoy it.Th idea for the screenplay is nice and original and the acting is rather decent, but that's about it... the build up is confused and mixed up, the exposition is in chaos and the script is at some points unbearable (not the dialogues as much as the behaviour of the characters...) This is all just my personal opinion of-course, but I felt like such a well thought of idea could have really been carried out in a much much better way.The ending did have some nice twists to it, but again, everything is confused and lacks basic order, therefore preventing the audience from being able to follow the events and really get into the film's story and experience. Then again, it may have been just me.All in all, I can't objectively say that my criticism is accurate, as it's just my opinion. So I can't really recommend that you watch this film, nor that you avoid it... sorry :)

Conspiracy theorists should have a ball with this one: two Jews play small-town Bible-hugging baddies in a rabidly anti-Christian movie. You be the judge; I couldn't care less; both religions are equally silly. Speaking of silly… Scene One. Two boys are sitting on a river-shore. They kiss. So is this horror film going to have a politically correct gay sub-plot, too?No. It's not two boys. One of them is the daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, the appropriately titled "Rumer" Willis. If I had to choose between a ridiculous name such as Rumer, and a normal girl's name such as Susan, I'd go for Rumer too: it fits her like a glove. The lip-pierced boy sitting next to her is one of the annoying actors from another disastrous horror flick, "Deadgirl".But FW has mercy on us poor viewers: only a minute into the movie, he shoots himself. He pulls the trigger and blows his tiny Hollywood brains, mere seconds after French-kissing Rumer. Coincidence? Kissing that woman would have driven the most mentally balanced man into suicide. But what about Rumer? When will she be killed off? How long before a hell's minion finally devours her or something? Not to worry, folks! Only a few minutes later, Rumer is killed off by the writers, too. Pew, what a relief! I don't have to watch this awful nepotistic produce for the rest of the movie.For every talentless, unattractive Rumer/Aniston/Dern that gets a movie career handed to her on a plate - just because her parents have great power in Hollywood and choose to wield it unjustly – there are 10,000 gorgeous and far more skilled aspiring young actresses that don't even ever get to audition for a toilet commercial. The main victims of this nepotistic corruption? We, the viewers. On second thought, who'd want to play in a cinematic turd such as FW?So it's quite fitting that Rumer's dad is played by yet another useless nepotist, Jared Harris, son of 60s movie star Richard Harris. Just watch Jared sob over Rumer's death: so utterly unconvincing; a perfectly awful display of nepotistic incompetence at its most horrible finest.FW has the usual run-of-the-mill horror-film BS, the standard to-be-expected one-dimensional cardboard stereotypes from the Horror Movie Guide To Making Useless Fluff: 1) the wise-beyond-her-years goody-two-shoes no-character-flaws-at-all girly, played by Rice, 2) the town bully (this time not a jock but the preacher's son!), played by the amazingly untalented Kelly Blatz who grimaces his way through this as if suffering a perpetual overdose of uppers; a dilettante (with the right Hollywood breeding), 3) the sensitive/shunned quiet loner – this time made to look and act like a whiny, depressed Emo, with horrible front hair that probably prevents him from seeing what's going on in the movie – which would certainly explain all the stupid decisions he makes, 4) the primitive, morally corrupt and stupid step-father, played with over-acting gusto by the very useless Adam Goldberg, 5) the unsympathetic alcoholic mother who dates losers, etc. Not to mention the usual boring clichés about small-town lynch-mob mentality and Christian fundamentalism. Hollywood, you damn bore, we know about self-righteous, corrupt, simple-minded Christian fundamentalists, you must have covered it in at least 90,000 movies. How about looking in the mirror for once, and giving us a movie about self-righteous, corrupt, simple-minded liberal Marxists, for a change? (The Christians worship the Big Black Book, the Marxists adore their Little Red Book; it's all the same crap to me.) At times, it seemed this movie focused much more on its obvious anti-Christian message than at furthering its horror plot – which appeared more like a sub-plot at times.Plenty of extremely silly shenanigans going on here. Here are the "highlights": 1) The scene when the preacher's son (Blatz) gives an impassioned religious speech to High School kids – who listen in awe(!!!) - is RIDICULOUS, perhaps the stupidest scene in this astonishingly dumb movie. 2) I said "perhaps". A scene that rivals it is Rice's kidnapping. This horse-manure of a plot-device has to be seen to be believed. 3) When Rice enters Emo's house and starts reporting about possession – right after another spate of murders – Emo's cousin from NY starts playing tritonic (evil-sounding) chords on the piano. I guess the director must have given her soundtrack duties as well (and seeing as how she can't act at all, that's just as well: makes herself at least useful that way). 4) The moronic plot-twist that has the hated outcast family at the center of the evil-demon witchery – making the movie's entire anti-Christian message almost obsolete! It turns out that the evil redneck (Goldberg) and the grimacing Blatz were RIGHT about wanting to kill them. Duh. (Who wrote this crap?) 5) Goldberg's utterly cretinous speech just before he burns Emo's piano-playing NY cousin.6) And you'll never guess FW's amazingly idiotic major plot-twist: it turns out the town's head preacher had a GAY AFFAIR with the boy who drowned in the lake, i.e. he was the one who had killed him! You've got to love the unintentionally comic mind of this turd's hopelessly confused writer.At first I was confused why Emo took the cousin's gun along with him. We all know that emos are spineless pacifists who would never shoot anyone – apart from themselves, of course (while listening to some awful 30 Seconds From Mars album). Sure enough, he took it to blow his Emo brains out.There are stark similarities in the Emo-Rice relationship to "Twilight" – and this certainly does not serve as a recommendation to see this turkey. As for the end-credits, you might find yourself giggling when you see the almost pythonesque sequence of suicide-corpses. This piece of crap is one for the history books. Whoever wrote this garbage shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a keyboard, let alone write another screenplay.

Suicide by teenagers is a common theme and this time around, Rumer Willis, daughter of Demi Moore is one of the kids caught in the middle of the untimely deaths. Willis is Natalie, who is sitting on a rock with her boyfriend as he reads from a black book. After kissing her he pulls out a gun and shoots himself. Hows that for the opening scene of a movie. Another high school student, Lindsay, is at a clothing store shopping with her mother when Natalie storms in with the black book, screams about a girl following her and runs to a back room and when Lindsay's father checks out the situation, he finds Natalie bleeding profusely with a pair of scissors sticking out of her neck.Several hours later, Natalie's father hangs himself. Are we having fun yet? The towns folks then have a small holy war between the secular and holy rollers. More stupidity follows with an uninteresting storyline and very pedestrian acting to a silly ending.