From Within

2008 "Death is catching."
5.6| 1h29m| R| en
Details

When the citizens of a small evangelical town systematically begin committing suicide, a young girl struggling to reconcile her Christian upbringing with her desire to experience the outside world finds her faith put to the ultimate test.

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Reviews

Ploydsge just watch it!
Marketic It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.
Skunkyrate Gripping story with well-crafted characters
Stephan Hammond It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,
timothy235 The portrayal of Christians in this movie is so bad that you would have to be entirely ignorant of the religion to suspend your disbelief. You have Church members beating other people up, lying, fornicating, kidnapping, and committing all manner of violent crimes, and not despite their religion, but because of it, in the name of the lord. It ruins the whole film. It's like watching a movie about orthodox Jews and somehow they're all at Sonny's eating barbecue. It just doesn't happen. Or like watching a movie about the army where are all the rank insignia are wrong. If the Christians had been portrayed more realistically, like committing crimes without simultaneously preaching, or even more realistically, if they weren't portrayed as Christians at all, the movie would have been much better. It's too bad really. It was a good idea for a horror movie but the stupidly unrealistic portrayal of Christians ruined it.
begob Suicide stalks the population of a religious town, one by one, until the heroine must save herself by dispelling the curse.This moves along at a fair clip, in Final Destination style, and the direction is good. The pursuit by dopplegangers is spooky, with a couple of mild jump scares, although the deaths are tame.Not so sure about the writing, as there are some clunky scenes, stereotypical characters (plus the cousin was there just for plot purposes), and it all wraps up with a ... chase through the woods. There are not just one, but two unconvincing crowd scenes where extras gather around in circles. However, there is a neat twist at the very end.The acting is OK, although the preacher's son seemed to have a giant zit under his makeup. Music lacked passion, but the piano nocturnes were good.Overall it felt overstuffed with elements that the writer struggled to wrap together, and the logic of the story meant the baddies were right all along.The long, scathing review just below is not unfair, but I found this passable entertainment.
fedor8 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.
Elizabeth Bottelberghe Am I seriously the only one who hated Elizabeth Rice? I don't understand why they chose her to play the leading lady. I see people complaining about the script, but I thought the script was great. Elizabeth Rice just doesn't know how to act. The other characters were very believable, but Elizabeth Rice just could not get into character. I didn't believe a word she said. All of her lines were spoken in the same tone, and her only believable expression was when she was crying when she found out that Claire died, and then when she learned that Aidan had to kill himself. I'm sorry, but her eyebrows were just so distracting, too. They're so bushy and she kept moving them, probably to distract us from the fact that she is terrible at faking emotions. I give the movie a 9/10 because luckily, the story, script, cinematography, and other actors made up for Rice's lack of skill. Sadie is hilarious, and I love Margo Harshman in everything she does. I own the movie, and have seen it several times, and I still sob every time I see Aidan kill himself. Even though I am a girl, movies rarely make me cry. I thought Thomas Dekker's acting was amazing right before he was going to kill himself, too. I also did not mind seeing him shirtless at all, even though it was too obvious that the only reason they had him shirtless was so we could have a sexy bod to drool over. Roy was pretty amusing, too, and made me want to start every sentence with "Shit, man". I wonder where they got the idea for Lindsay's strange family, and how Trish got custody of her. What happened to her mother? Doesn't she have any other family? I can overlook this, but they really should have explained this better since it's such a weird situation... I also like how they made the witches the good guys, and the hypocritical-psycho-Christians the bad guys. Even though the witches did put the curse on the town, you can still sympathize with them. I'd want revenge if a bunch of crazy people went and killed my mother for something she didn't do. And once Aidan realized that at least Lindsay wasn't like the others, he regretted what he did, and was willing to take his life to make things right. We all make mistakes and make stupid, impulsive decisions out of anger, but we don't all make up for our mistakes, and most of us wouldn't if it involved killing ourselves. Aidan ended up being a much better person than the Christians in that town, and that is true a lot of the time in real life, as well. I don't have anything against Christians, but I can't stand Christians who are huge hypocrites and horrible people who tell me that my beliefs are wrong and that I'm the bad person. I can relate to Aidan, so I really loved his character. Overall, this is one of my favorite movies, and most people will probably enjoy it if they can look past Rice's acting.