After plenty of lackluster big budget whiffs with their original features, Netflix has gone indie budget with It's What's Inside which has the distinction of being even worse, but at least not costing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars sucking. So, yay for fiscal restraint?
A pack of college friends gather in a mansion that belonged to one of their mother's before she passed away. The occasion is the host's impending nuptials and they're there to party like it's back in school. The last to arrive is Forbes (David W. Thompson) who shows up with a suitcase with a machine inside that he proposes they play a party game with. The game is simple: Everyone puts a pair of electrodes on their temples and when he presses the button, their consciousnesses are swapped between the bodies. While in other bodies, they have to guess who is in which bodies.
After the original shock passes, they're all in and of course immediately start cheating - both in the rules by lying about who they are and in beginning to hook up with each other as they work out their true desires while using other people's bodies to do it. Things get wildly out of hand when two of the friends die while swapped meaning not only are they gone spiritually, it also means two people no longer have their bodies to return to. And not everyone wants to go back to their original shells.
While the premise has potential, it's squandered by writer-director-editor Greg Jardin's overly self-indulgent visual wankery and all the characters being mostly annoying twits. We never really get a bead on who these people are - there's a reason I didn't bother rattling off the characters and actors - there are eight of them with no time to set them up before they start swapping around and other than the one couple where the guy clearly wants another woman it's all noise. With wacky split screens and exaggerated colored lighting, Jardin comes off as a try hard rather than focusing his expanded Twilight Zone-ish tale.
However, to be fair, he does use a visual shorthand to help us know who is really who and the way backstory elements are portrayed with photos is genuinely cool in the vain of the Michael Pena stories in the first two Ant-Man movies.
With chaotic execution of a okay premise, it turns out that It's What's Inside is a whole lotta nothin'.
Score: 3/10. Skip it.
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