Infested (2002)
Review by Dindrane
Film:
DVD:

Written & Directed by Josh Olson
Starring Zach Galligan, Lisa Ann Hadley, Daniel Jenkins, Amy Jo Johnson, Nahanni Johnstone, and Robert Duncan MacNeill

Features:

• Trailers
  

Rating: R, for Really Dull

Anamorphic: Yes

My Advice: Spray it with some Raid

Five college friends reunite for the funeral of one of their own, who has died under mysterious circumstances at a medical research company for which he was a janitor. Soon, the remote summer home where they gather to reminisce is under attack by a group of killer, biologically-engineered flies who like to attack and then occupy the bodies of humans, breeding more of themselves to attack yet more human hosts.

First, let me tell you that I love monster movies. I usually don’t care if the creatures involved are irradiated giant ants or biologically mutated weasels, just so long as some animal munches a lot of humans in a suitably remote location. I know they’re not “fine cinema.” I don’t care. I don’t care that there are plot holes the size of Godzilla or logical inconsistencies that would trip up a sewer croc. But even I was hard pressed to finish this one.

It is not unusual for a monster movie to have plot holes or for audiences to have to make concessions for logical inconsistencies, but this film is the worst of the lot. There are times when light serves to kill the flies and times when it doesn’t, for example. We never get answers to a lot of rather important questions, such as how the Villain is alive at all or why no one from the biological research company has noticed that the flies are missing and come to investigate. Given that light is supposed to kill these things, and we are never told that it has to be special light, I’m also not clear on why, since it’s daylight, the main characters can’t just escape. If the human hosts let the flies out, won’t the flies just croak in the sunlight? They don’t die? Why then, that’s a convenient and rather silly plot hole.

Basically, it just isn’t very exciting to watch a bunch of yuppie gits whine and wait to die, even though the fact that they’re all irritating is part of the point of the Villain… we just sympathize with him a little more than we should, I suppose, when the Lord of the Flies is unmasked at the end of the film. It would have been a better movie if we had been able to follow him along throughout the movie and thrill to his evil wicked plan. Alas, it’s like a Very Special Episode of thirtysomething only less exciting, if that tells you anything. The only tolerable characters are the Final Girl and the drug dealer.

There are no extras on this disc except for trailers and the widescreen presentation.

The audio and video quality are both solid enough. The film has been digitally remastered, and it looks nice enough, if not great. The filming itself is nothing special; the camera crew and directors were just trying to get this one done, not elevate it above its genre, which is a shame.

Had we viewers actually been led to care a whit about any of these people or even had an actually menacing monster, this could have been bloody good fun. But as it is, there’s much more whining and existential angst than running, hiding, bleeding, or crying, and that’s just not right. For a good buggy film, try Them or even Arachnaphobia instead.