Infected DVD Review
Infected DVD Review
Don't catch it!
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The tagline "It Won’t Kill You … It Will Become You" just might explain why the cast of this dismal sci-fi horror movie boasts such names in the credits as Golden Globe® and Emmy®-Nominee Isabella Rossellini, Gil Bellows and Judd Nelson: it's not really them, it's their alien counterparts who do not know how to pick scripts.
The story follows tabloid reporter Ben (Bellows) and his on-again, off-again girlfriend Lisa (Maxim Roy), also a print journalist, on the hunt for the source to story in which the headline "Aliens Invade Boston!" is actually a reality. At first, the aliens look just like us. But peel off that first layer and they are pure, unmitigated el cheapo CGI. Scary! I am kidding… it's not at all scary, because even though some of the creatures are well-designed, they are so poorly realized that they lose potency in the blink of an eye (there's basically no depth or shading — the cartoons are just dropped on top of the live action, and there is no attempt made to match the inserts).
To be fair, Infected starts off interestingly enough with an obvious nod to Paul Verhoven's mutant bug horror classic, Starship Troopers, and it ends with a Michael Crichton style Coma bang. But mundane machinations in between is also purely unoriginal. Homages are OK, but every filmmaker should try and bring a little bit of their own spin into things. Once Ben and Lisa, who have broken up over Ben's bankrupt sperm supply, join to fight the forces of otherworldly alien invasion, the story just goes through the motions check-listing everything from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Soylent Green.
At least the actors don't just go through the motions: they try, they really do. However, perhaps they wouldn't have been so earnest had they seen how haggard, puffy and wrinkly the cinematographer made them look. And this is before all the bad stuff starts to happen to the characters — even natural beauties like Rossellini are no match for the flat, listless lighting and appallingly unflattering angles. Bellows is especially good in the acting department, and so at least Infected does make me look forward to seeing new (and hopefully better) work from him in the near future (but I guess that's "unthinkable" until Unthinkable, starring Michael Sheen and Samuel L. Jackson, comes out next year.)
Infected was made for TV on a low budget. Its creative team mostly come from kids' television (Zoey 101, iCarly, Merlin's Apprentice), and it is obvious they aren't ready to sit at the adult's table just yet. The sexual jokes are inappropriately sophomoric and tittering, and there is no nudity or gore to speak of for those genre fans to just want the boobs and blood.
But it's not the lack of effective horror elements that made me immune to Infected. For me, personally, it is very hard to get around an ugly, cheap-looking film. But even if it was shot by Vittorio Storaro and directed by Darren Aronofsky, I don't think anything have could saved Infected from its ultimate affliction. It's simply boring, predicable, unoriginal and pointless at its core.
The DVD has no additional features, not even captions for the hearing impaired.
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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson