Review by Lary Crews
The straight-to-DVD film ““Infested”” is bad in ways that should make it required viewing in film schools where other beginners could learn from it. The mistakes propagated by the first-time writer/director are fixable given experience and study and fledgling filmmakers would do well to avoid these errors.
It is perhaps a credit to cinematographer M. David Mullen, a veteran of more than two dozen films, that the film frequently looks quite good. Sadly, however, that often serves to focus more attention on the shabby special effects and inane script.
Directors who steal directly from good films often claim that their film is a homage. Occasionally, this is true. More often, it is just plagiarism.
Writers who fail to convince an audience to suspend disbelief often claim that their script is merely taking a satiric swipe at the conventions of the genre. More often, it is just that the writer is handling the genre conventions badly.
“Infested” begins at the funeral of a 30-something and moves quickly to the only other location in the film, a house out in the middle of nowhere somewhere on Long Island. For an interminable 20 minutes or so the cast banters back and forth in an awkward montage set to 80s music which could be seen as a homage to The Big Chill except that Big Chill had really interesting conversation against a backdrop of really great music.
“Infested” has such recycled babble as “Carl and I are very feng shui conscious.” And “Oh, my gosh. The house just looks great doesn’t it?” and “Yeah, but I’m having trouble going from chataranga into downward dog.” This series of intercut exchanges serve mostly to slide in some heavy-handed foreshadowing about the CIA and plots to smuggle drugs into America.
If you are going to attempt a homage to The Big Chill, you need to strive for memorable dialogue. Instead, we get such patently obvious and sub-par exchanges as this:
Mindy: “Look at that ass. Hmmm. I hate to see you leave but I still love to watch you go.”
Carl: “Geez. Mindy. Subtle, much?”
Warren: Hey, Mindy, how you doin’?”
Mindy: “Good. Do you know you are even hotter than you were back then.”
Warren: “Thank you.”
Carl: “So what am I? Chopped liver?”
Warren: “You look surprisingly good for a married man, Carl.”
Carl: “You’re a shameless hussy. You know that, right?”
Mindy: “Uh-huh. What are you going to do about it?”
Among the reasons this dialogue is so inane is that it’s not the way a woman talks; it is the way a film school geek hanging around with his friends at Starbucks wishes a woman would talk.
As one woman says: “Guess it can be pretty dull if you don’t speak the language, huh?”
Once the host decides to play some music (actually using a 45-RPM vinyl recording) the girls begin to dance just the way all horny screenwriters imagine girls would dance if the writers’ dreams had come true.
Bob, played by Jack Mulcahy who got his start in the two classic films, Porky’s and Porky’s II: The Next Day, lucks out. He gets to drive off the picture for about an hour, a deal no doubt set up by his agent. His motivation? He doesn’t like the other people in the house.
Finally, a good half-hour into the film, something actually happens.
Mindy (played by Nahanni Johnstone who was a successful model in Europe before moving to New York to study acting.) comes out of the water wearing shorts but naked from the waist up. She proves that not all actresses have surgically-enhanced breasts, Any reason for this nudity? Nope. Just that the horny screenwriter always wanted to see a women come out of the water with naked breasts. Nothing to do with the plot. She puts her skimpy top back on. (The skimpy top she could have worn into the water since she got her shorts wet anyhow.)
Suddenly, fake violins on the derivative soundtrack begin to shudder and the camera moves at a low angle so we know that “Something Is About To Happen.”
After the evil bugs we have yet to see move her bag about six feet away (leaving nothing on the sand but the shoe prints of the crew member who actually did the moving) things really start to happen.
The director's shortcomings were most apparent from the frequent “out of sight, out of mind” errors. That is, after a scene with several zombies on the front lawn, we join the characters inside the house for a long series of scenes without any return reference to the zombies on the outside. What are they doing? Hanging out at craft services? Why have they not tried to get into the house?
Another “lonely screenwriter” addition to the script is the fact that one woman decides (in the middle of the most horrible zombie attack in recent memory) to go upstairs and take a shower. Take a shower! Why? So the director can attempt a cross-reference to both Hitchcock’s The Birds and Psycho with none of the style of either of those films. Oh yeah, and so he can get another woman to be naked.
The illogical screenplay also permitted the rapidly-dwindling cast to come to the conclusion that the zombies are scared of light even though they are standing in bright sunlight and then that they are killed by a particular song from the 80s.
“Infested” is a lousy film for a lot of reasons but it’s difficult to blame the cast who work gamely to try to make the dialogue sound real.
Camilla Overbye Roos (Robin) played Helga Dahl in one of the most successful films of all time, “Titanic.”
No doubt, being in “Infested” gave her the same sinking feeling of impending doom.
