From Within (2008)

You won't be disappointed!

How sad is this?

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

The acting in this movie is really good.

Is it even possible to find a town that deeply religious in Maryland? Why wouldn't the very well off witches not just move? The jocks at that high school would've torn Dylan apart with all his religious crap. these much well off witches would've had a arsenal in their house(if not a entire gun store)to fend off the religious nutters. Green shirt follower 40-50 something religious nutter was funny./Fedor8 had the funniest review that I seen in years.

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.

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.

After the witness of a suicide starts off a chain of similar cursed deaths in town, a young woman tries to keep her hyper-religious boyfriend from going after the supposed start of the curse long enough to stop it before more deaths occur.This here was a rather troubling and pretty flawed effort at times, though it does have a couple pretty interesting parts. The film is on when it's dealing with the curse and the graphic deaths that result, and beyond just the surface shocks and entertainment these are surprisingly deeper than expected. Spread throughout by the appearance of ghostly doppelgangers that mark the deaths as suicides, there's much more to this aspect of the film beyond the inherently creepy and thrilling scenes they are just on-the-surface, and altogether these provide the film with a lot of good marks. Unfortunately, there's still a lot wrong here and it's all centered around the backwoods inhabitants and the heavy presence of religion in their lives. Far too often this denigrates into a religious rant that never explains anything other than their backwards and irrational thinking damaging whatever this could've done with the material, and by unleashing a twist late in the film that makes for the whole affair mirroring a similar fate doled out years earlier for the same reason makes this whole part challenging and really tough to get by, making it so severe at times that it drags the rest of the film down considerably. It's still watchable, but not as it could've been.Rated R: Graphic Language and Graphic Violence.