À l'intérieur / Inside (2007) Review

Rating 4.5/5

Writer: Alexandre Bustillo

Directors: Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury

Cast: Béatrice Dalle, Alysson Paradis, Nathalie Roussel, François-Régis Marchasson, Jean-Baptiste Tabourin

Known in English as "Inside", "À l'intérieur" is a great little nightmare. I watched a dubbed version which hurt the immersion, but in a way that made the movie easier to watch. There are lots of nasty and disturbing incidents in the movie and when you think things can't get even sicker, they do.

The premise is quite simple. A pregnant women is being stalked by another mysterious woman who seems to be after the unborn baby and she is willing to do anything to get it, and I mean anything. And no, she's planning to wait for a natural birth... The scenes involving the two women are fantastic and truly horrifying. I found myself contemplating to stop the movie at some points, which is very rare for me. It didn't help that I was watching it alone.

While the premise is cool, it's tricky to fill a full length movie with it. The solution the movie-makers went with was getting a bunch of other people get involved in the conflict and get killed violently to bring up the body count. On the one hand these kills were quite well done, but on the other hand it made the movie feel like a generic slasher movie in places and it hurt the atmosphere built in the scenes involving just the two women.

With that said, the movie overall still works. It's full of suspense, action and long moments of disturbing violence. I loved being thrown out of my comfort zone into this insane roller coaster.

Not for everyone, but if you like your horror movies genuinely dark and disturbing this one is an unmissable little gem that runs circles around its Hollywood counterparts. IMDB doesn't list any more movies from the creators, Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, which is a shame.

--Mickey

Piranha 3D (2010) Review

Rating 4/5

Writers: Peter Goldfinger, Josh Stolberg

Director: Alexandre Aja

Cast: Elisabeth Shue, Jerry O'Connell, Steven R. McQueen, Christopher Lloyd, Ving Rhames, Kelly Brook, Adam Scott

Is Piranha 3D a good movie? If by "good movie" you mean a masterfully directed good plot featuring deep and interesting characters who face intriguing conflicts, it's not a good movie. But if you by "good movie" you mean lots of crazy gore, violence and boobies, then it's probably the best movie ever made by man.

Piranha 3D is another great movie from Alexandre Aja. I loved his The Hills Have Eyes remake, High Tension was fantastic and I even kinda liked Mirrors for the most part. Here Aja shows us that he can also be funny.

The non-violent segments are utter rubbish. I know they are there to move the story along and put the violence in context, but I would almost prefer the movie to be nothing but little fishies eating lots of naked guys and girls, roll end credits. Why even try to pretend that the characters and their obnoxious little story-lines matter? The purpose of a plot and characters in a horror movie is to make us care for the characters so when they're in danger we're in suspense because we don't want to see them get hurt. Piranha fails miserably in that department and I found myself wishing the "talkie bits" will finish already and let us get to the good stuff. Blah blah blah, I like this girl, blah blah blah, she dates this jerk who hates me, blah blah blah, I'm a single mom cop. Shut the fuck up. Nobody cares. The movie only manages to make us care for two characters: the two young children, but that's cheating. You stick a puppy or a child in a movie and they get instant sympathy without any need to establish an interesting character.

That is not to say that I didn't like the actors in the movie. I just wish they did less talking and more dying.

But that's the bad stuff out of the way. Sit through that crap and you will be rewarded. There are small and delightful moments of violence in the first half of the film, but when all hell breaks loose you get one of the longest and bloodiest orgy of death and gore ever depicted on the big screen. It's over the top, cheesy, trashy and ridiculous and I loved every moment! Being gay I couldn't really care for the abundance of boobies one way or the other, but I must say that Piranha 3D has the best ever use of 3D for bobbly underwater boobies. Eat your heart out James Cameron.

--Mickey