Tuesday 30 April 2013

THE EVIL INSIDE

CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS AND MUMMY MAKE THE BAD MAN STOP

The bad man in question being Pearry Reginald Teo. He made futuristic dystopian SF nonsense The Gene Generation which was rubbish, but at least had Bai Ling running around in strange trousers to distract you from the misery, then he made Necromentia which was even worse: grim, grimy, incomprehensible garbage in which a bloke tries to bring his girlfriend back from Hell (represented by some kind of access tunnel on the London Underground). And fresh on the rental shelves is this insufferable piece of crap that's mostly a glum teenkill movie with a ridiculous plot twist bolted onto the end.

This was originally called Dead Inside but to judge from the packaging (bleached out black-and-white imagery with bright red lettering), it's been retitled The Evil Inside purely to cash in on confused shoppers mistakenly thinking it's that found footage exorcism thing The Devil Inside they heard something about a couple of years ago. Half a dozen instantly hateful bitches and vile douchebags attend a badly lit party thrown by a disturbed teenager: she predicts their violent and unavoidable deaths, and everyone goes shrieky insane and fulfills the prophecy. Then she wakes up in an asylum....

Pretty much everything about The Evil Inside is thoroughly insulting. It's not just that every character is loathsome, amoral and repugnant, and their justifiable deaths are nowhere near spectacular enough (a mundane selection of shootings and stabbings, but no-one gets impaled on a church spire during a lightning storm or run over by a combine harvester); it's not just that the stupid twist ending negates the previous hour plus of tedious drudgery. It's not even that the bulk of the film takes place in the half-light because Pearry Teo has again confused "dark and atmospheric" with "switching all the lights off". (Teo's IMDb bio even states that he dropped out of his college video production and cinematography courses after failing his classes! Yup, it shows!)

The bigger problem is that someone, somewhere down the line thought this was good enough to be foisted on the paying public. That's not a flaw exclusive to this film: there are increasing numbers of films which simply aren't up to a professional standard (recent examples that have clogged up my DVD player have included I Didn't Come Here To Die and Island Of The Dead, but you can toss a stick anywhere in the horror section of HMV and it'll bounce off a dozen more similarly worthless turds before it hits the ground). The democratisation of the film-making process, in which there are no studio executives who can fire these geniuses for shoddy work, and technology has drastically reduced the physical financial cost of making films to the point where any babbling halfwit can pick up a camera, has ultimately allowed people to make films when they simply aren't up to the job. The Evil Inside is directed by someone who can't direct, written by someone who can't write, shot by someone who can't light, performed by people who can't act, and ultimately watched by someone who can't take this shit any more. Seriously: the planet would be a slightly better place if these people weren't making films, because they're no bloody good at it. That's how bad it is.

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