Review:

From the writers of such cinema classics as Snake Out of Compton and Airplane Vs. Volcano, who also directed Jurassic Galaxy, comes one of the laziest and most nonsensical wastes of 90 minutes I've ever had the displeasure of seeing. As much as I want to break down the litany of plot holes, piss poor CGI scenes, and terrible script, I don't want to spoil the story in case any of you make the terrible decision to watch Behind the Walls (It's not even a good/fun bad movie. It has no value in any way), so I'll keep it to generic notes. The plot makes no sense. The background of the family is vaguely mentioned and we get zero story for the house/ghost/monster/whatever does the "spooky" things. It's like if we never leaned that the Good Guy doll in Child's Play is possessed by the soul of a serial killer and we just jump right into the murder doll or if Magneto just hated regular humans for no reason. I know just as much now as I did before I watched. No nobody gets any character progression and even though I feel like we are supposed to empathize with the mother, I actively rooted for her to be killed off. The first half hour is packed with flashbacks that took place at an unestablished time and are shown to us for no particular reason. The entire movie is riddled with plot holes makes no sense. It's hard to explain exactly how bad it is without spoiling anything, but I'm not sure the writers reread the script after they finished writing or watched the film before they sent it off. Beyond the absolute shit show of a script, there are many technical issues as well. The sound mixing is terrible. The audio levels are all wrong. The only thing that is at a regular volume is the cheap jump scare sounds. You have to turn the volume way up just to hear the dialog and even then a quarter of it requires you to turn it up another ten or so levels. Had I seen this is a theater, I'd have missed at least half of the story because they couldn't be bothered to check their sound levels. There are scenes where I assume we are supposed to be able to read letters, but we can't because they are out of focus. The scene where the boy gets in the shower, they try to keep only his top half in frame but when he lifts his leg to get into the tub, we can see he's in his underpants. Why wouldn't you just pull the camera up when he moves? Why didn't you just zoom in on his face or the top of the set. Why would you put in the effort to frame his top half until he goes to take a shower with clothes on? It's a simple thing and a stupid mistake. Why did you even have to show that? Nothing important happens between him entering the bathroom and being in the tub, so what was the point at all? This is just one of the many stupid little things that would have taken no effort to fix. For a film with two independent production companies, I don't expect top level CGI, but Behind the Walls looks atrocious. We get what appears to be stock footage during transitions ( like generic water ripples or dust clouds on a black background) and any time they do original CG, it is exactly what I would expect from the people behind a film like Snake out of Compton. This is Asylum level garbage. The one thing I can give them a little credit for is that the acting is better than the average shit horror film. The child actors aren't absolutely terrible (they aren't good though and they have zero chemistry with anyone in the cast) and the two adult leads are okay sometimes. Beyond that, everything else is abysmal. I was hoping that if Behind the Walls wasn't a good movie, that it would at least be a "So Bad It's Good" movie. It's not fun as a horror movie as the only horror comes from the worst jump scares that don't even make sense. If a character sees a spooky in the mirror but they don't blink or look away and look back and the only thing that changes is the camera, the spooky would still be there. The whole look back and it's gone thing only works if they take their eye off of it and look back and it's gone. Literally the only thing that changes is that they switch to camera 2 instead of camera one. They even do one that looks like what happens on those flash mazes that you friend tricked you with in 2002. It totally fails as a horror movie and it offers no redeeming qualities as a Wish Upon or The Room type garbage movie. It's poorly paced, boring, uneventful, confusing, bland, and they put as little effort into the movie as possible. I can't recommend Behind the Walls to anyone, ever.