Why’d you and your brother come back?
Main Cast: Elizabeth Rice, Thomas Dekker
Director: Phedon Papamichael
Each year there are movies produced that are never seen by the public. Their content is considered too graphic, too disturbing, too shocking for general audiences. This is one of those films.
I’ll give screenwriter Brad Keene credit, he is a man dedicated to his subgenre. Beginning his career in 2006 with The Gravedancers about a group of friends cursed by a trio of vengeful ghosts, Keene’s most recent project was 2009’s The Grudge 3 about a death curse that moves from victim to victim in an inner city apartment building. What did he do in between these projects? He wrote FROM WITHIN, about a small town infected with a death curse that jumps from victim to victim.
The Gravedancers was good, until the goofy CGI ending. The Grudge 3 was passable I suppose, but only just. FROM WITHIN, however, is a pretty good movie. It’s not without its flaws, but none of those are necessarily story-related.
In the town of Grovetown (how long’d it take to come up with that one?), there are two kinds of people. There’s the folks who go to church every Sunday and love the Lord, and then there’s the Spindlers, Aidan (Thomas Dekker) and his brother whose name I can’t remember. Several years ago their mother was murdered by the people of Grovetown for being a witch, burned alive in the Spindler back yard. The boys left town, but eventually came back because this is their only home.
Turns out their mother really was a witch. And as the movie opens, Spindler Brother #2 is putting into motion a curse that will wipe out the entire town. But first, to activate the spell, he must sacrifice himself. He shoots himself in front of his girlfriend, Natalie (Rumer Willis), who then catches the death bug and, freaking out when she sees a mysterious woman following her, she runs back to town, covered in blood, to her father’s clothing store. There her best friend Lindsay and someone who is not Lindsay’s mother, Trish (I never did catch onto what the relationship was between these two, but she clearly states at one point, “You’re not my mother.”) are looking for something for Lindsay (Elizabeth Rice) to wear to church. Natalie is in a panic and her father and Lindsay take her to a back room where, as soon as she’s left alone, Natalie kills herself with a pair of scissors in the neck.
Later that night, Natalie’s father hangs himself in the shop. The curse continues to make its way through the population of Grovetown, but when it finds Lindsay, Aidan Spindler comes clean on the origins of the spell, and how to break it.
I dug FROM WITHIN. Like I said, the flaws here do not stem from the writing, and it’s even shot and directed well. In fact, the only complaints I have at all are a few minor clichés that worked their way into the look of the movie. For example the Spindler boys live in the gigantic house of their childhood, which is understandable. Except this is a house occupied solely by two teenage boys, and yet it’s pretty clean. It appeared to have been dusted and the piano is in tune. Dude, I’m 52, I rarely dust because it’s a pain in the ass and there are just so many flat surfaces, it never ends!
Also, some of the characters were pretty cliché–so maybe that did stem from the writing a bit–like Roy, Trish’s boyfriend, played excellently by Adam Goldberg as a dimwit truck-driving gun-totin’-hat-wearing dirt bag. And the church everyone attends is HUGE, lavish, modern, Paster Joe is projected on a big screen, and he wears a mic, but the choir is about 6 people in a little box on stage, and if you step outside the doors you go from 2008 modern America directly to 1950s small town. I understand this was probably meant to show just how important the church is in the lives of the citizens of Grovetown, but I’m calling overkill on this one.
Director Phedon Papamichael, whose usual day job is as cinematographer on much bigger and better movies, like WALK THE LINE and 3:10 TO YUMA, makes several locations in Maryland seem like the perfect small town to raise your God-fearing brood in if you’re trying to regain that sense of innocence when Americans could leave their doors unlocked and still wake up alive in the morning. He makes a good movie, but some of the clichés just grated a little too hard on me to give this movie a top rating.
Four stars, definitely; it is the best of the After Dark movies I’ve seen in a LONG time. It leaves no questions unanswered, and the answers is does provide all make sense within the scope of the story. While there was plenty of bad dialogue, and a fair amount of over-acting, neither of these hindered my enjoyment of the movie.
Scary? Well. It had a pretty high creep factor, I’ll give it that. And the ending, while predictable to a certain degree, works very well and still satisfied me when all was said and done.
While far from flawless, FROM WITHIN works. I can recommend this one without hesitation, reservation, or forewarning.
Read more 8 Films to Die For reviews
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
Leave a Reply