Written and Reviewed by: Eric R Lowther
Infection (2010) aka “Infection; The Invasion Begins”
Written by: Bryan Brewer
Directed by: Howard Wexler
Hey kids! It’s your old pal Eric R Lowther aka biguglyhairyscary crawling across your screen once more with 2010’s “Infection”, or, as the full title says, “Infection; The Invasion Begins”. After watching I can see why they chose to use the shortened title. I’m here to tell you we don’t need any allusions to this thing having a sequel somewhere down the line.
Our story opens somewhere in the future with a reporter researching what has come to be known as the “Modern Plague”, a horrific illness of a sort that started way back on 9/9/2009. Her search leads to an old woman, Sarah, who has been locked away in a mental institution for decades. Sarah says she knows how the plague started and claims the government has kept her institutionalized for her entire adult life to keep her from talking and blowing out their carefully-crafted conspiracy. Now that her time is short, she wants to tell the tale in a movie-length flashback…
We begin Sarah’s story with our hero, Deke (writer Bryan Brewer) returning to his tiny hometown after a 10 year stint in prison for killing his stepfather. He finds his mother has disowned him to the point of cutting him out of family pictures, his high school sweetheart Sarah (Kelly Pendygraft) is dating the local failed high school jock Billy (Brian Guest), and a sheriff who looks just a little like a younger and less-sociopathic Nick Nolte (Lochlyn Monroe, who carries a surprising list of genre credits to be involved with this movie) that wants nothing more than for Deke to drop off the face of the earth and trouble his town no more. After finding all this, Deke tries to do the hero-type thing and leave town for the selfless benefit of all but runs afoul of Billy and his townie crew. This our first of many run-ins with the “I wrote the damn thing so I get to be a badass” syndrome from Brewer, and the fight goes on just long enough for us to get that point before everything really starts going to hell.
It seems a meteorite has crashed in the area, and it also seems the guy who finds it and reports it to the sheriff, and even the sheriff himself, have never seen a movie where a meteorite crashes. If they had, they’d know that it always brings trouble. This time, it brings hyper-intelligent parasites that look like penises that have been flattened by a steamroller. The townies get infected (hence the title) with the parasites during their fight with Deke and Billy demonstrates his own multi-appearing fighting style; runaway-like-a-little-bitch. Meanwhile, the guy who first found the meteor turns up dead, causing the sheriff to lock up Deke on suspicion of yet another murder in his town.
Hey kids! Fun fact; this has been turning up in a lot of the movies I’ve watched recently, too much in fact. Now, typically a sheriff is a county or parish’s top law enforcement officer as well as being charged with the task of collecting county taxes through his office. But in most horror movies that use the office the guy never seems to leave the little town. Most counties, even those with the sparsest populations, have more than one town in them. The sheriff is also an elected political office, and even in the smallest or least-populated counties the sheriff is typically far too busy with administrative and political duties to be personally out in the field hassling movie heroes and chatting with a town’s riffraff. I guess “commander” or “chief deputy” just aren’t impressive enough titles these days…
Anyway, the zombies finally break in and Ben locks himself in the cellar, where he’s forced to shoot Cooper again when he turns… oh, wait… sorry. I guess I needed a little break from talking about this movie. Deep breath… focus…
The parasites seem to sense that the movie’s badass hero has been taken off the streets and in a matter of what can only be an hour or two have infected most of the townsfolk. Even though Deke doesn’t know anything more about the flat, interstellar penises than anyone else does, the people know he’s the only one that can save them. It’s also possible the rest of the cast realized if they didn’t set the writer free to continue hogging the screen and spouting silliness he’d write them out of the film, but I’ll try to take the high road here and think the best of everyone. Once free, Deke and Sarah manage to convince the sheriff of the phallic danger besetting the town and get scientific counsel from another old high school friend, a science geek that manages to give them a powerful weapon against the invaders. From here we alternate between standard siege and escape movie modes that place us in constant danger of swooning under the intense gaze and staggering awesomeness that is Deke until at some point the thing finally ends back with future Sarah and some silliness that makes us think the threat of a sequel will only be quelled by someone making sure Brewer stays the hell away from his macBook.
Now let’s have a peek under the hood, shall we? Technically speaking, there’s not much wrong with the movie. It’s competently shot and looks as good as about any other indie shot-on-video film. The biggest technical failure would be in the oh-my-fucking-god-that’s-shitty CGI fire that pops up here and there. I’m pretty sure I could create more convincing flames with Microsoft Paint. But the movie’s real failing is in its plot and accompanying script. There are tons of plot holes here, with the first being; why would the government let Sarah live in the first place? There would be no reason to keep her around, and arranging for an “accident” decades ago would’ve been far easier and more secure than letting her sit around. But let’s just suppose keeping her kicking made sense. In that case, why the hell is a reporter allowed to just stroll in and start talking to her now? This is the very opening of the movie, and the plot holes and goofiness just go on from there. The rest of the cast does try hard to make the movie watchable, but they just can’t seem to get a scene that doesn’t have Brewer in it making wisecracks or going forth to bravely sacrifice himself in one way or another.
Of course, he never actually does sacrifice himself. Since he’s, like, a badass and all he just cocks an eye to the camera or smacks someone around and mumbles “This just isn’t my day” a few times and he lives through the scene. This is compounded by making virtually everyone else around him a flaming coward just to make Deke’s character (and by extension Brewer) look even more badass. We talked about Billy, who at one point is so afraid and distraught that he sits in a corner of a room blubbering until Deke talks him down. That’s not the only instance, though, as Billy is shown running away from even the slightest chance of harm. Problem is, Billy’s character at the start of the movie was more than ready to throw down on Deke for being a murdering sum-bitch come back to town to steal his woman. It just doesn’t fit. Hell, at one point even the sheriff’s deputy is so afraid of what’s going on he actually hands Deke his gun to go and search a room because he’s too afraid to do it himself. For fuck sake’s even the parasites are just flattened penises, because if they were shown in their normal dimensions they may have been larger than Deke’s own, and you just know there’s no way Brewer would’ve allowed that to happen. Outside of this, the dialogue is overall flat and doesn’t really give the actors much to work with, making the viewing painful at times to watch.
So, now we can get to the real question; is it any good? The only people that will really like this one will be Brewer and his family and friends, and even they watch it just to appease him. If you really need to see alien parasites create zombie-like people just pick up “Night of the Creeps” instead, ‘cause I’m sure that’s exactly what the writer did here. This is just a vehicle for a megalomaniac to live out his daydreams in a way that he can make others watch them, too. Oh yeah, and that’s another thing, too. This thing is being marketed as a zombie movie. It’s not. Not even close. Still, if for some reason you just need to see the equivalent of someone masturbating to a picture of themselves for an hour and a half you can pick it up from Amazon and your usual online sources for anywhere from $3.00-$18.00… wait… $18.00 fucking dollars? Really, Amazon? You can also rent or stream it from Netflix, and if you still actually want to see this thing I would definitely suggest renting or streaming before buying.
Time for me to ride off into the sunset, unless of course Brewer’s around and then I guess I would just be riding off into the light cast off by his machismo. Make sure you’re staying abreast of all the great content here on The Witch’s Hat blog (yes, Misfit Boy, I said “breast”. You can stop snickering now.) and stop by and see us sometime in our forum over at Killer Reviews. There’s also all the mind-blowing audio sweetness from The Witch’s Hat family of podcasts to consider as well. With a tip of my imaginary hat to Keely, Kyle, Root, Grey and Misfit Boy (J.B., I said that was enough with the snickering), this has been biguglyhairyscary saying see ya, kids.
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