Sometimes you can tell right away when it's going to be a bad day.
You wake up late. Yank out a couple black fingernails in the shower. Forget to turn on the coffeemaker. Pull tangled clumps of hair out of your brush. Burn the toast. Spit bloody molars into the sink. Lose the car keys. Find a toe in your sock.
You know, the kind of day you'd call off of work in a heartbeat if you had any sick time left.
Or a heartbeat.
But instead you suck it up, use your good eye to find the door, and drag your sorry carcass to work. Because after all, even though you've been leaving piles of wriggling maggots in your wake all morning, you really need this job. And besides, those chicken wings and mozzarella sticks aren't going to serve themselves!
And so it is with our unhappy protagonist (and her unfortunate patrons) in writer/director Eric England's independent body horror film, Contracted.
Before the movie gets on with its finger-down-the-throat premise, we find ourselves in a morgue with a doughy pervert who is making sweet sweet love to a bio-hazardously tagged dead person. (I know, I can't believe I just wrote that sentence either.) There is no mention whether or not the "L" word was uttered during coitus, or if the Pillsbury Perv-boy promised to call the lifeless corpse the next day, but the audience is given a clue as to the purpose of this rendez-"eew" when it is shown a quick close up of an empty test tube.
Enter Samantha (Najarra Townsend) a sexually active anti-social lesbian drug-user. (Stereotypes are so unfair.) The audience is introduced to Sam at a house party where she is hoping to meet up with her latest girlfriend but instead spends the evening being cajoled to get drunk by a not-so-subtly smitten lady friend, and thwarting the advances of a wide-eyed male suitor who seems to be unaware of Sam's sexually active anti-social lesbian drug-using ways. So let's just say it right now. Samantha's got game.
In fact, the girl's got so much game that when she finds herself alone in the kitchen, yet another man tries to hit on her, and...Hey! Wait just a minute! ISN'T THAT THE DOUGHY CADAVER-HUMPING GUY FROM SCENE ONE? (But seriously folks, stereotypes hurt.)Well, somehow during the course of their conversation (and after the strange man hands her a drink and claims to have seen her set it down earlier, wink-wink) Sam is talked into putting aside her anti-social lesbian drug-using ways and finds herself heading to the backseat of a strange car. But her screams of "No!" make it plain that when we catch up to her, she is no longer there by choice.
(Once again, friends: No jokes. It goes without saying that rape is never funny.)
From this point on, strange things begin to happen.
Okay. Even stranger things begin to happen.
Sam is understandably traumatized by her experience but chooses to keep the rape a secret, making her mother (horror movie veteran Caroline Williams) suspicious of her behavior. Mom openly worries that her daughter is using drugs again. The worry turns to alarm when Sam begins displaying signs of a very nasty sexually transmitted disease. The early symptoms include weird mold-like patterns under the surface of her skin and eyes that are red and calloused.
The story follows course as Sam tries simultaneously to hide her escalating symptoms, discover a cure, repair her shattered relationship, and generally continue her sexually active anti-social lesbian drug-using lifestyle. (Sorry, gang. That horse has been dead for awhile, I know. Hopefully the movie's stiff-loving morgue attendant doesn't have sex with it and start a crappy sequel.)
The story itself holds no real surprises. The acting is adequate to above average. The cinematography never met a gray it didn't like. The script doesn't give the characters much to do other than be gross or appalled. And if you can quote anything memorable from this film, you're thinking of the wrong movie.
But Contracted is (ironically) a popcorn movie for the gross out crowd. It's kind of scary, kind of silly, and despite its dark subject matter and heaps of grue, it's kind of fun.
So if you're in the mood for a visceral entertainment that is more schlock than shock and more sick than slick, then drop this one into the trusty DVD player. And if it gives you chills, don't be too concerned. It doesn't mean you're coming down with some horribly disfiguring and incurable disease or anything.
By the way, is that your ear on the coffee table?
No comments:
Post a Comment