My experience with feature-length animated horror is pretty limited. I’ve seen Akira (it counts), Wicked City, Monster House, Paranorman, and Coraline but that is it. Writing them out kind of makes it seem like a lot, but considering I’ve seen dozens of hundreds of horror movies (probably not quite thousands), that is a minuscule percentage. But now I’ve seen From Inside, a movie that I’d never heard of before finding it on Tubi. Why not stick around while I tell you about it? Let’s get into it, shall we?
Cee is a pregnant woman traveling on a hellish train through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The train is dilapidated and requires frequent repairs from the engineers and when the repairs aren’t possible, they just cut cars loose with passengers inside. When they run into a herd of cattle, they convert some cars into an abattoir and slaughter them for food. Along the way, they come across doomed towns and seas of blood. Cee is understandably concerned for her baby. When the train picks up a bandaged stranger that she keeps crossing paths with, she doesn’t know whether he is a danger to her and her unborn child or not.
There is some cool animation in this, but a lot of this movie is animatic. That means that stills from the graphic novel this is based on are brought to rudimentary life through “moving” a small section of the image. That’s kind of a bummer. It’s not engaging to watch. Maybe the budget was the constraint that made that necessary. But the imagery itself is pretty cool. And the mystery of the hellscape is intriguing. We get some flashbacks that fill in some of the story but what Cee is seeing from the train seems much more hellish than the aftermath of a war or a plague or even both. Which seems to be the case. And then there’s the stranger. He turns up at some key moments and ends up being integral to the story. But his interventions and the presumed (by me) message of the story is a bit on the trite side. I would have probably rolled by eyes at the end but the thesis is just vague enough for me to have doubts as to whether I’m right or not. Obviously, I’m being vague to avoid spoilers but let’s just say that it seems a little preachy. Overall, it’s a mixed bag of some crappy animation, some interesting design, and a decent mystery that may have a lame message. But at least it wasn’t boring.
The Final Cut: From Inside is a mostly lame animatic adaptation of the graphic novel of the same name. It has some interesting imagery and a decent story but its message is trite.
