Simply A Masterpiece

hyped garbage

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Blistering performances.

This is the first review I felt compelled to post. Maybe I can save someone else from wasting 81 minutes. This movie made my list for the 5 worst movies ever made. If you liked the Blair Witch you might give Infection one star. The whole movie is shot from the point of view of a dash cam in a police car driving up and down the same stretch of road in a park. The sound effects are puzzling (cats growling??!!) and seeing how the infection is spread makes you wonder how the first guy became infected (at that point in the movie you are looking for anything to make sense). This movie makes you want to throw things at your TV. Someone wasted $35,000 - don't waste your time.

The premise sounded interesting. A horror flick from the perspective of a dash cam. Hmm, I thought. Let's give it a try.After the first 20 minutes I thought, okay, this is one of those films meant to be bad, like Sharknado. A film not meant to be taken seriously. A joke. That's it. A joke film.It consists entirely of driving slowly down a dirt road back and forth... back and forth. At short intervals there were a couple of people stumbling and lurching around like teens playing zombies at Holloween. Then more slow driving up the dirt road... and back... for an hour.I actually laughed out loud when the annoying girl in the dress started stamping her feet and yelling at the walkie talkie while in front of the car. She looked like my daughter at eight being told, "Get that room cleaned." I continued to think this film was a joke until I looked up the reviews to read how entertaining the movie made to be bad was. Then I realized it wasn't a joke. This was an actual film. Really? An actual film meant to be taken seriously. Well, okay.... In that case, I wish there were a -10 rating I could give it.I'm going to have to show hubby this one. I won't warn him. I'll just watch him watch it. Now that will be entertaining. :-)

Director Albert Pyun does not inspire confidence. His name evokes groans and memories of cheap and often pretentious genre films. But when I heard that his latest project was a single uninterrupted shot I was as intrigued as anyone to see the results. The fact that Infection (retitled Invasion when it DVD) was getting praise from critics only served to heighten my interest. The film's novelty is that it is a science fiction film told from the fixed view of a high definition camera mounted on a police car. With a cast of mostly unknowns and an aura of mystery, Infection inspired a similar level of intrigue as the much higher profile Cloverfield (2008). If only the results were as exciting. Whether the consequence of budgetary limitations or a misguided artistic aspiration, Infection is a huge disappointment. Shoddy-looking news footage and title cards set the scene as the film begins with a Police officer driving down the dirt roads of a national park. He meets a local resident acting very strangely. Once again something alien has come to small town USA, but while the soundtrack provides plot information the visual element is an endless steam of footage of bland dirt roads. Pyun is both a prolific hack and a talentless artist and has been consistently disappointing viewers for nearly 30 years. One can theorise that this event-free narrative experiment and its largely meaningless visuals are intended to isolate viewers. To hypnotise or unsettle an audience used to seeing everything. If that was the artistic intent that's fair enough but it simply doesn't work. While I respect that using a single traveling camera to encounter various characters is a complex undertaking I can't help but feel that he could have done more. Set within an urban location and with a larger cast this could have been, like Cloverfield, an extraordinary film. As it is it's just a bore. The fact that over-the-top sound design, a smattering of dubious visual effects and an admittedly interesting score seek to shatter the faux-realism of the found footage merely adds to the overwhelming sense of disappointment.

Here is a fantastic concept for a film - a series of meteors crash into a small town and the resulting alien infection is caught on a deputy's single camera dash cam as the town slowly taken over. Leave it to Albert Pyun to screw that up! Don't get within 100 feet of this flick! Holy crap, what a bomb...it might be Pyun's worst yet! The crazy thing is there is the germ of a creative idea in here - an entire of an outbreak told from the POV of a dashcam. When I heard that a while back, I imagined the car smashing into stuff, people getting run over, and infected types breaking the windshield and surrounding the car in chaos. That would be cool right? Instead, we have the lead driving around in circles for the entire time in a wooded area, occasionally running into the three infected types who just stand there. The last bit is literally a 15 minute shot where nothing happens in front of the camera, just noises are heard offscreen. Stay away!!! On a somewhat relieving note, I think I am officially calling an end to my Pyun watching...only took me 20 crappy movies to realize I have better things to do.