Makani Young has a secret. Fortunately, it’s not a horifying secret. I mean, she hasn’t murdered anybody.
Still, it’s a bad enough secret that it helped push her parents toward divorce. And it forced Makani to move out and live with her grandmother in a different state.
The fact is, these days secrets can plague your life because they’re generally just a smartphone click away. That’s why Makani has done everything from adjusting her habits and patterns to avoiding the sport she used to play to changing her last name. She’s done everything she can to be an invisible nobody in her new school, Osborne High.
And to be honest, all of those secret-hiding choices were much wiser than Makani could have guessed when she first arrived. Because secrets are about to be a very dangerous problem at Osborne.
You see, there’s a masked killer on the move in the school. Or a better term might be … on the hunt.
This murderer seeks out hidden nastiness—brutal hazing, racist thoughts, illicit drug use—and takes steps to trap the perpetrators, reveal their past actions and butcher them in vicious ways.
Of course, there are a lot of secrets to burn through in a school as big as Osborne High. But fire spreads quickly, and it’s hard to contain.
Just like secrets.
And blood.
Makani and her small group of new friends are close. They support one another and are very open about their own flaws. (Though, on the negative side, they are also very judgmental of those outside their chosen group.)
After a killing, a friend of the victim sings a song with the lyrics, “To God, His name and His glory.” A memorial service is set up in a church. A student calls for a public, non-denominational prayer in a crowd.
A bloody murder takes place in a church sanctuary.
Makani has a secret relationship with a guy at school named Ollie. We see them kiss and make out a couple times. During one smooch fest in a car, Makani climbs up on Ollie’s lap, straddling him. The amourous pair’s movements imply that they begin to have sex before being interrupted. We later see Makani in a low-cut dress.
Teens have conversations about body parts. During a party, Makani overhears a number of teens sharing sexual secrets—including someone admiting to posting naked pictures, another being attracted to his cousin and another stating she had a miscarraige. One of Makani’s friends is a “non-gender” individual who’s called out and embarassed in public.
Gory murder and gushing blood are the “entertaining” focal point here. A student has his Achilles tendons slashed with a large knife. Then, as he writhes in agony, screams and spurts blood, he’s repeatedly stabbed in the chest.
We see pictures of a gay teen being hazed and beaten bloody. A group of teen girls are hazed as well, being physically slapped and pushed around in a different scene. One is shoved into a roaring bonfire. We see pictures and flashback images of that girl’s scarred face, body and hands.
Someone is Tased while falling into a fountain of water. He then has pills jammed down his throat and his neck slashed open wide by a sharp blade. Several teens are brutally impaled by a foot-long knife. Another is gutted by a sword. And that sword is also jammed forcefully up through a man’s jaw and out through his forehead.
Makani is Tased, doused in lighter fluid and almost set aflame before being saved. A cornfield maze is set ablaze, trapping scores of innocents in a raging fire. Makani and friends drive through that fiery field until their car catches fire and comes to a halt. Then we see numerous bodies of dead teens as the friends run on in the field.
A young woman is slashed across the stomach after being chased and tormented. She then crawls across a church sanctuary leaving a bloody trail in her wake before being stabbed repeatedly and hung up by the neck in a lynch-like tableau.
Makani and her friends tend to be pretty tight-lipped about their secrets, but their profane views on everything around them are rarely held in check. More than 25 f-words and a dozen s-words are joined by multiple uses of “a–hole” and “b–ch.”
(One scene features several teen girls with the words “b–ch” and the c-word scrawled on their foreheads in magic marker.)
God’s and Jesus’ names are misused about a dozen times total, with God’s name being combined with “d–n” in five instances.
Several people make offensive hand gestures.
Teens puff on joints and bong-like contraptions regularly. One party, for instance, features a teen who breaks out his father’s Nazi memorabilia that he’s transformed into elaborate marijuana vaping devices for his crowd of friends. They puff on everything from Luger pistols to gas masks.
Another teen in Makani’s group of friends is secretly addicted to prescription painkillers. Someone later pins him down and jams dozens of pills down his throat.
Teens drink beer and hard liquor at a large party. Makani’s friend Ollie reveals that his parents were both “drunks.” Two different hazing events feature people being force-fed beer and alcohol.
A friend of Makani’s smokes cigarettes on several occasions.
Makani’s friends and other teens are convinced that all cops are racist. And they tend to agree with the idea of disbanding police forces. And the group of Makani’s friends spout nasty comments about kids in their school. A truck is stolen.
There’s Someone Inside Your House kinda sounds like a title pulled out of some old file labeled: Titles I Haven’t Used Yet. And since it has very little to do with this movie itself, it may well be. It doesn’t take long, however, to see that this pic is slasher/horror that’s been custom designed for Gen Z viewers.
This pic focuses on what Hollywood perceives to be the new generation of cool-kid outcasts. You know, those slightly nerdy teens who proudly proclaim their racial, gender and social/sexual right-mindedness while expressing their pseudointellectual disdain for everyone else. And then the movie’s murderer only kills those whom the film suggests deserve to be butchered in horrible ways. So, bullying jocks, racist conservatives, druggies and privileged whites meet goopy ends.
For all of that “enlightened” window-dressing, however, we’re still left with a gory, foul-mouthed, R-rated slasher movie. There’s Someone Inside Your House feels like an updated version of past gorefests. But it’s mired in the same predictable tropes that have befouled large and small screens for decades.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
