INFESTATION

In 2080, the Earth is now reduced to a pile of rubble: a virus has wiped out the human race and the few survivors live in an underground city in constant fear of terrorist attacks. A team of scientists is working hard on an antidote to the virus and, to experiment with it, has sent a group of soldiers to the surface, with whom all contact has been mysteriously lost. Commander Sash, assisted by Air Force Captain Loki, is put in charge of a special rescue unit that will have to go to the surface and report what happened to the previous team. The antidote has had, however, the side effect of transforming the corpses into creatures hungry for human flesh, so the new team will have to deal with the monsters and try to prevent this new plague from spreading. "Infestation" is yet another independent product that has had the fortune of finding worldwide distribution for the home video market. Often, these low-budget works are of such high quality that they make even the overly sanitized blockbusters released in theaters pale in comparison. Unfortunately, this is not the case with "Infestation", an action-fantasy-horror (more action than anything else, in truth), which in several points is truly disastrous! First of all, it must be noted that the director Ed Evers-Swindell, who also appears as the screenwriter and producer of the film, wanted to create a work too big and complicated for the means he had at his disposal, in other words, he wanted to shoot with a few thousand dollars a film that needed a budget of several million dollars! Therefore, special effects, sets, fights, makeup, are all essential elements for a film like "Infestation", but, given the available means, everything is so poor that it often becomes ridiculous. The computer graphic special effects, especially in the introductory sequence and in the finale, are excessive and overly artificial (it seems to be watching a non-interactive sequence of a video game); the makeup of the zombies is clearly poor; the sets were made using an abandoned factory and the aesthetic result suffers greatly; the choreography of the fights is not bad, but the overly music video-like editing makes them often confusing. The actors do not seem very convincing and in fact some of them are amateur actors, taken here and there among the director's friends and the film's collaborators (the screenwriter Ross Evison is also the lead actor and his brother Simon plays one of the supporting roles). The screenplay, written by six hands, plunders freely from "Incubo sulla città contaminata", "Matrix", "Day of the Dead", and especially "Resident Evil 1 and 2", from which it also steals the narrative structure and the ending; moreover, the poster was literally plagiarized from that of "28 Days Later". The story in general, then, seems too undecided about which path to take: the introduction and the first very long action scene are pure science fiction, the film then takes a clearly Romero-style horror turn, with the appearance of the zombies, but then abandons even this suggestion to create a pyrotechnic action movie full of scenes so exaggerated that they become irritating, not to mention silly. The directorial technique used by Evers-Swindell is not the worst, on the contrary, the guy seems quite in tune with the action-adventure genre, but this debut cannot certainly be considered successful.