Just know, the voices in my head are not happy
Main Cast: Chad Graham, Christine Tonry
Director: Paul Catalanotta
I have a love/hate relationship with the Fandango app and their free-with-ads horror movies. I love that they have over 2600 FREE horror movies (with ads), but I hate that so many of them look like hot garbage. I love that they have lots of titles I recognize and have seen. I hate that the ones I haven’t seen, I haven’t seen for a reason.
I love that every so often you find one that you probably never would have heard of before, and I hate that so many of these movies will fly under everyone’s radar.
Today’s movie was … I haven’t decided yet; I hope to form a solid opinion by the end of this review.
THE THING INSIDE US, from 2021 by writer/director Paul Catalanotta, tells the story of Daniel (Chad Graham) and Shelly (Christine Tonry). Shelly sleepwalks, every night without fail, going out to the front porch where she stands in the same spot—they’ve even marked it off with chalk to make sure it’s the same spot—until Daniel comes out in the morning and wakes her and takes her inside. To try to better understand what exactly is happening with his wife, Daniel has rigged the entire house with cameras, is constantly rolling, and he’s uploading the videos to the internet in hopes someone out there will see them, have had a similar experience, and be able to provide them with some answers.
Seems simple enough, right?
This movie wasn’t super long, an hour and 23 minutes, which was one of the things that worked in its favor, meaning I could get it watched and the review started before I had to leave to get the boys from school. I also liked that it was basically one location; we never leave the property. Mostly we’re inside with a few scattered outside scenes, all captured on even more cameras. I liked that, for the most part, we only have the two characters to deal with, and I liked that those two actors had really good chemistry. If someone told me they were a real life couple, I’d believe them.
For the most part, I think I enjoyed THE THING INSIDE US. I didn’t LOVE it, I did check the time here and there, but at no point did I think OH MY GOD, THIS IS SO STUPID! For the most part, this movie succeeds. Where it fails, however, is a big point. When we get that third act reveal it was like oh, you had such potential for going literally any direction you wanted and THIS is the path you choose? I mean, okay, I guess. But still, that’s such a first draft idea.
The ending is just so rote and expected, I could have shut the movie off twenty minutes before the credits, and I still probably could have told you in detail how it ends. So that part sucked.
Did it suck enough for me to call this a bad movie, though? You know what, I don’t think so. Because I really did like the actors and the initial premise. And while there were enough out-of-camera shots to call this NOT a found footage movie, I did like the way the cameras tied so organically into the main plot. Instead of Daniel just happening to buy this new video camera and deciding to film their daily lives like so many other found footage horrors, there’s logic to why everything is being recorded, and I really appreciated that.
I also appreciated the scope. Despite not being impressed with how that third act played out, I did like that this isn’t a localized event, that the details of the plot are probably playing out all over the country, which we see a glimpse of in some of Daniel’s online interactions. THE THING INSIDE US is a small movie with a small budget, but it’s got big ideas, and I dig it.
In the end, I can’t give this movie a RAVE review because I will always think the third act needed a couple of revisions to get to a really original place. But everything leading up to it worked very well for what it was. And for a having to sit through a few ads here and there, I’ve seen MUCH worse. I’ve give this one a very light recommend.
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