Movie Review: Contracted

Ok let's kick this thing off with Contracted.

Basic Synopsis

What if the zombie apocalypse was an STD? That's Contracted in a bottle.

Our heroine, named Sam (Samantha), is suffering the effects of unrequited love from her girlfriend Nikki. Sam gets wasted at a party and has a one night stand with some guy named BJ (yep that’s his name.)

Unbeknownst to Samantha, BJ works at a morgue, and we are led to believe that he has sex with a corpse.  For whatever reason, that makes her sex with BJ an awful, rapey debacle that leads to her contracting the zombie disease.  All this happens in the first 20 minutes of the movie.

The remainder is a three-day descent of Sam turning into a zombie. The catch is that she thinks she contracted an STD so she tries to keep it to herself, which ultimately leads to her demise. This, despite the fact that everyone in her life is noticing that she is in serious trouble and is trying to help her out.

So each day Sam awakens to find her body in an increasingly grosser state of decay, to the point where on the third day she is clearly dying.  It’s all sort of reminiscent of The Fly in terms of the body metamorphosis, right down to the scene where her teeth and fingernails are falling off.

On the final day Sam rage-quits on her mom, her education, her job, then kills her lame girlfriend, her party friend (for no particular reason, other than she’s mad) and then she has sex with a boy she has been avoiding all movie.  In the last scene she crashes her car, presumably dies, and comes back to life as a zombie, and then it’s curtains.

Content and Feel / Ambiance

This movie really wound up feeling a lot like a gory chick flick.  At the end of the day we are constantly bombarded with Sam’s emotional issues with her work, her stupid girlfriend, her mom, her friends, her self-esteem, and basically everything other than the fact that she's slowly dying and becoming a zombie.  All of those things would be acceptable if I was expecting to watch a chick flick, but I wasn't.

So this movie’s title should not be Contracted so much as it should be “Conflicted”- it's very much an emotionally charged, anti-hero story which has  a plot built for teenage girls, but has the gore factor of a slasher film.  It's like the movie director and producers deliberately tried to exclude both potential target markets.  Or perhaps, they attempted to score both horror buffs and emo-girls in one fell swoop.  I would say that attempt failed.

Oh and about the gore factor.  I have a fairly high tolerance for violence and gore.  I mean, I'm a 31 year old guy who was raised on video games.  That being said, this movie had some really eerie things that I could just not stomach.  Seriously how many “is she dying or does she have a really bad period” scenes does a movie need? I think the scene at the end of the movie where the dude has sex with Sam in her decayed state and she literally starts bleeding to death while in the act…oh man, only time can heal that mental wound.  Honestly, maggots falling on the floor??  Those scenes added nothing to the movie and just showed how shallow the characters had been written.

Notable Awesomeness

I applaud the movie for trying a new spin on the zombie thing.  I mean everyone is trying to cash in on the zombie hysteria created by Walking Dead - and with all the movies and books which have already been published on the matter, it's interesting to see a new take on the nature of how the zombie phenomenon spreads.  I won't lie, I actually really like the concept of gradual zombification.  We’re all used to the normal “get bit - turn into zombie within 24 hour” routine.  So the three day thing was actually pretty neat to see.

But that's as far as I am going to go.  

Also, Fat Neil from Community was the drug dealer.  So that’s cool.

Notable Lameness

This movie has a lot of the earmarks of a poor concept film.  Most notably, unbelievable characters, unrealistic and rushed plot, and needlessly cheesy gore.  All at the expense of the whole “STD zombie” idea.

Plus there’s the fact that this movie focuses too much on the main character’s personal problems rather than the matter at hand.  I get what the director is going for here, we all do: SAMANTHA IS THE ANTI-HERO.  Ok we all get it!  So now what?  Why the hell would you use that in a zombie movie?  Zombies are a societal evil- that’s what makes them so cool.  They are the horror equivalent to the Borg in science fiction.  They ruin humanity and turn everyone into a mindless creature.  What makes good zombie stories are the characters trying to live within the growing anxiety of a civic collapse; a death of values, ethics, morals and the very meaning of life.

We don’t get anything like that in this movie.  Samantha just continues to go about her business as per normal.  She even keeps going to work!  WTF??  It’s all just a bunch of teenage drama.  Where is the raising of the stakes?  Why should we care about this stupid, self-absorbed protagonist who ultimately turns on her family and friends, likely turning them into zombies (maybe that dude she slept with and her two girlfriends...but she kills them, do they come back?) See?!  We don’t even know! 

And all that cool stuff happens in the like, the last 10 minutes of the movie.  Quel dommage.

Verdict

Contracted is a neat idea, but that’s about it.  It had its moments, but far too few, and too far between.  I was seriously underwhelmed with the delivery of this thing.  Not scary enough to be a good horror movie, not interesting enough to be psychological thriller material, and just too much like a teenage girl’s movie gone wrong.  Neat ideas only get your foot in the door, you still need a story and believable characters to make the movie work.

The Epitaph:

Here lies Contracted. I will never buy pads for my wife again.

☠☠/10