MOVIE REVIEW: “There’s Someone inside Your House,” and it’s frightening 

It’s 1996.

A high school student called Casey – played by Drew Barrymore – receives a call.

Bathed in cameo-lighting, she seems charmed by the enigmatic voice at the other end of the call.

While moving around her spotless kitchen, she pulls a knife out and slides it back into the butcher block.

However, before we hear wedding bells, Casey finds herself on the business end of Ghostface killer’s knife. And since the killer is not immediately found, you could say it almost becomes a Cold Case(y).

Silly puns aside, it’s an iconic opening scene. One that makes “Scream” a definitive slasher movie.

So you shouldn’t be surprised when teen slasher “There’s Someone Inside Your House” pulls the same rabbit out of the hat.

In the opening scene of this movie, footballer Jackson Pace (Markian Tarasiuk) is all alone at home just like Casey was and he also receives a call which leads to his grisly death.

The killer, derivative of Ghostface killer, wears a mask.

But not a ghoulish one, instead this killer’s mask is a 3-D printed one fashioned in the image of his/her latest target.

As with any teenage movie, we are introduced to an ensemble cast which makes up a motley crew, wearing diversity on its sleeve, with a non-binary character, several Persons of Color, a token poor-little-rich white boy and, later, a gay kid.

Set in the scenic town of Osborne, Kansas, where corn and football seem to be the townsfolk’s reasons for waking up every morning, Jackson’s death comes as “WTF” moment.

With the “F” in that acronym probably spelling “Fresh corn”, when said in full.

Most of Osborne attends the football game that Jackson would’ve starred in if he was not having a Drew Barrymore moment.

As he dies, we learn that his death is punishment for a hazing ritual gone terribly wrong.

When everybody attending the game receives a mysterious text message with a video clip of Jackson beating the crap out of openly gay quarterback Caleb (Burkely Duffield), who scores a touchdown while everyone else looks at their phones, the town goes into whodunit mode.

But before the town can collectively adopt the name “Sherlock” for all its townsfolk, more killings occur punctuated by jump scares that will make you just wanna Scream (pun intended).

The vicious frequencies of these deaths prevent any titillating subplot from unfurling in the shape of a romance between Alex (Asjha Cooper) and Rodrigo (Diego Josef).

However death doesn’t stand in the way of Makani (Sydney Park) and Ollie (Theodore Pellerin) swapping saliva.

It is such a shallow romance, however. Evidently not one to die for as, spoiler alert, they both live.

Zach (Dale Whibley), who is the token rich white boy I mentioned earlier, offers a potential plot twist with his hatred for his overbearing father Mr. Sandford (William MacDonald). However this hate is not given enough screentime to fester into a credible prefix for crime.

As a plot device, it may have served as a narrative conveyor belt towards the character development of Zach. Which development may have had a knock-on effect to make fulsome the performances of the rest of the cast.

The story outline is further bend out of shape by demanding a bunch of teenagers be themselves, remove their masks and stop hiding their true selves from each other.

As a morality tale, this is a little shallow. For, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he'll tell you the truth.”

Meaning we all tend to reveal ourselves when we think nobody is watching.

Sadly, “There’s Someone Inside Your House” doesn’t have the ambition to find itself where it ultimately loses it viewers.