First, this not exactly a zombie flick, it falls slightly into the “body horror” subgenre, while the overall story focuses on a mysterious flesh consuming infection it drives a different route, likely due to budget constraints. Stephen Michael Giglio delivers his directorial debut in the horror genre, and 8-years after his first movie Go West (2010) a comedy, on this recent venture he took on the positions Editor, Writer (Adam Romanchik assisted), and producer, which is very common in low-budget movies, and it successfully obtained distribution through Breaking Glass Pictures. One should note, that this movie isn’t Stephen’s first venture into the horror genre, he worked in the sound department for director Chad Ferrin’s movie The Chair (2016).
It starts with Dana’s (Amanda Morales (Hell House LLC II [2018])) 30th birthday, which launches in a positive direction, with her father Rufus (Hunsicker), reentering her life, after being absent for quite a while, as a drunken bum, they start to begin mending their relationship. However, all horror fans know it’s rare when the best intentions go in the correct path, deliver happily rosy outlooks. The party starts sluggish, but suddenly goes off-track when one of the guests, falls ill, hallucinating and vomiting chunks on her boyfriend, and quickly the disease spreads. This virus quickly works by blood and more vomit to contaminate pot loving stoner and Dana’s boyfriend Mike (Joe Walz (The Night Sitter [2018]). Rufus, arrives to the bloodbath, rescuing Dana not affected from the pathogen, but she sees corpses, namely her boyfriend haunting from the shadows that Rufus doesn’t see. Hence, he decides she’s had a violent episode rather a foreign virus invasion in the body and mind, and it cause terrible visions with interesting results.
The makeup effects look very good for the film, the odd movements of the ghosts/creatures as well as solidly lit sets (sometimes a tad too bright for the mood), help to show the advancing stages of the virus upon the body hosts. However, the cracks in the budget clearly show through in other places, first the runtime , this movie only 71-minutes, and it easily contains a few moments of padding to assist in expanding the film’s outline. While focusing on the infected look, the overall story lacks a focus arc from beginning to end, the sound also drifts from much too quiet to too loud hence one needs to constantly play with the volume controls when attempting to listen to the movie. Horror fans, can handle paper thin characters, even tissue paper dimension, but when that leads to both their backgrounds having conflicting backstories and the movie faltering to a continuity problem earlier that leads to plot holes it all makes it difficult to handle.
Borrowing from the tagline, it’s deadly boring, the cast tries to convey the confusing story but fails to bring enough engaging scenes, clearly wanting to have a sudden start of the movie, failed to provide a meaningful array of frights. It clearly limits itself with the lack of violence typically found in a horror movie, and delivers a subpar plot, which viewers will likely struggle to stay focused on the film itself.
Tagline: It’s coming… And it’s deadly.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7819394/
IMDb Rating: 2.6/10
Baron’s Rating: 2.5/10