Not like, "oh i can't finish this" or "my god this is disgusting" it's more like "Oh man this makes Rob Zombie's execrable Halloween remake look like Gone With the Wind "
Don't watch it. Especially don't watch the sequel, both currently streaming on Netflix. Why did I?
Well Acacia was at school and I got home 6 hours early and was sitting on the couch with the dog and I was all "oh man, only 74 minutes and it's a zombie movie why not check it out before studying my nuclear magnetic resonance unknown compound assignment?"
1: longest 74 minutes in existence.
2: not a zombie movie, or a body horror movie, more like a trash movie
3: should spend more time studying Ochem .
I don't want you to watch it. It's disgusting, it's gross (there's a difference), it's offensive, it's almost every kind of "-ist" you can think of, i honestly do not know who could watch this and go "oh man i want more."
The only positive thing i have to say is the end credits music was pretty ok. Put on netflix and skip straight to the black screen with the white text if you absolutely have to.
"Why did you have such a negative reaction" no one asks?. Well i'm still going to tell you. You may know that I spent a lot of time on my Jurassic Park 4: Jurassic World 1 review on that hilariously frustrating pterodactyl scene. My issue was with the bizarre sudden violence inflicted on a character for no reason aside from her basically being onscreen, and the possible ways to improve that violence like having it happen to a hapless Paul Blart-esque security guard instead, since i am a fan of appropriately levied carnage.
I was initially curious about Contracted from the disturbing cover and description on netflix: a greyed-out picture of a woman with one eye turned spoiled milky-white, her cheeks gaunt and one side of her mouth cut and bleeding, almost black with rot. It's an alarming image, and the description matched it, the main character afflicted with a progressing disease causing the piecemeal death and decay of her own body after a one-night-stand with a stranger.
FIRST OFF: The description is a lie. It's a rape. The main character is raped, in a chilling scene that unfortunately is extremely well-made depicting a non-violent sexual assault where she has been roofied and not in control of her mental faculties, the camera set in a static position outside the rocking car where in between moans and gasps she begs her attacker to stop, that they shouldn't be doing this.
It's a fucking effecting goddamn scene, you sit there watching it as a dog looks at you with his baleful brown eyes and you absolutely 100% understand the definition of sadistic, drug-facilitated, all-too-common sexual assault that is just endemic to our trash abhorrent good ol' USA #1 culture.
Man, did I expect a Romero-style social commentary with that sprint out of the starting gates. Do you get it? Fuck no.
The premise of this turd starts with a nameless, faceless figure fucking a corpse in a mortuary, washing his hands poorly, then driving away. The opening titles play, the camera panning over pretty flowers, and then it says DAY 0 in big block letters. Classy.
We follow Sam as she navigates the last days of her life, starting with her fruitless calls to the voicemail of a woman she's obviously involved with, and then her trip to a party her friend is throwing that is attended by Fat Neil from Community, a beta male, and the guy we saw fucking the corpse earlier.
Sam's friend is almost overjoyed that she apparently is broken up with her girlfriend and forces cup after cup of 90% vodka. 5% mixer into her hand (the friend is played by a woman who looks and acts so much like Mary Louise Parker that i think my extreme dislike of Weeds bled over into the movie at this point).
She encounters the beta-male (named Riley who is the main character in the second movie which goes Highlander 2 on the premise of this shit) who we immediately figure out is in love with her despite her sexual orientation and her still technically being in a relationship, and he also goes to the restaurant she works at every day for lunch and sits in her section in order to be in contact with her. This guy, man, it's a good thing they got a guy that looks like a weasel. Go look up "nice guy" in urban dictionary and you see this piece of shit's face.
Sam shoots down Riley since she is a homosexual and not attracted to him and thinks he's boring, and her dumbass Weeds-lookalike friend gets her more drunk to the point the necrophiliac human-shaped thing approaches her as she stumbles in the unoccupied kitchen, and hands her her "drink" (it's a cup full of drugs spoiler alert). They have a boring conversation where the monster's face is 'creatively' out of focus or frame in each shot, and he winds up leading her to his car where he takes advantage of her inability to consent to sexual relations and rapes her continuously before driving out of the movie.
Immediate cut to DAY 1 and she wakes up in her house, hungover as shit and oh no her bed is full of blood and she thinks her period started. It goes downhill from there.
Basically the next 3 days ("creatively" titled DAY 2 and DAY 3..... OF 3 *dun dun duuuuun*) play out where her body is slowly decomposing and she waits until the second day to go see a doctor who basically tells her there's nothing he can do once he found out she's sexually active (DID YOU GET IT YET?).
I cannot fucking stress how terribly this movie is made. Sam moved back home with her intolerant christian mother after having trouble with her girlfriend (who is possibly the worst character in the history of film), and Sam has an extremely poorly-conveyed history of self-harm. Her mom is constantly shrilling "what did you do to yourself" and there's a scene with a gay conversion therapist I kind of zoned out on.
Sam is falling apart --which is supposed to be symbolic but instead it's just shitty special effects-- and nothing, absolutely nothing important happens until the last 30 minutes of the movie. This could have been a short film.
DAY 3 ... ... ... OF 3 Starts and it's a mess. Her teeth start coming out and her fingernails easily pull off, and when she's brushing her hair her scalp pulls off and she goes to see her ex-girlfriend. This lady is played by the most awful and annoying actor on the face of the planet. Every second she's onscreen she sounds tired and bored and frustrated with the main character talking to her, and also has an english accent since why the fuck not, despite having a job as a server in the restaurant industry somehow can afford the cost of an immigration visa.
Sam winds up murdering her when her girlfriend tells her they're breaking up since Sam had sex with a man the other day, and then she goes over and murders the Weeds friend that told her ex that she saw Sam having sex(BEING RAPED).
~ ~ ~
There should be commentary there.
There isn't.
This wretched piece of shit ends on the third day with both of Sam's eyes basically rotting out, and the most disgusting black gash dripping down from the left side of her mouth to her chin, and on that thir day, TWO people admit their attraction towards her and kiss her directly on the mouth, moaning passionately.
At this point i have an experiment for you. Go buy a can of Fancy Feast. Pop the top of the can, and then place it in a glass box in your car and leave it in the sun for three days. Then go to your car, get the can, pull the lid off all the way, and tongue-kiss the blackened, decomposing, viscous, effluviant mess than drips out of that ruined meal for cats.
That's what it would be like making out and having sex with this woman who is progressively transforming into a walking corpse. It doesn't work.
~ ~ ~
After the murder Sam calls the beta-male over to the house and in another unfocused or out-of-frame discussion, she tells him that she needs someone to talk to and that she always loved him since it's what he wanted to hear. They almost immediately begin having sex for some reason, him kissing her decomposing death hole and pulling off his pants before deciding to have unprotected sex with a zombie. The most DISGUSTING dialogue of the movie happens, where he says "oh it's so tingly" and "you're so wet (with congealed blood)" and "oh fuck there's something moving in there".Riley pulls out and a bunch of mealworms like what my lizard eats fall to the floor in a pile of decayed tissue and fluid, then he runs to the bathroom to vomit.
Sam then stumbles out of the house, crying, gets into a car and crashes it into her mom's house and fully zombifies, this piece of shit ends with the cops facing the zombie down and her attacking her mom and BOOM cut to credits.
This trash conveyed nothing. A woman turned into a zombie from an STD spread by a sexual assault that is never called back to, and everyone she encountered also will turn into a zombie eventually since it turns out it's a disease somehow.
Contracted is awful. If you like it I desperately need to know why. Please help me, the reason for this existing makes no sense. You wanna know an actual horror and much better movie? Zombeavers. Go watch that instead, and listen to the end credits song.
In conclusion, I love horror movies. They're short, they're self-contained, and there's a billion genres tailored to your specific interests. This is supposed to be a zombie/body horror movie and it fails on all counts. Body horror is my favorite genre aside from scenes of Jason grabbing people and folding them in half like a book, since body horror is so goddamn unnerving. The concept of your own physical frame rotting away and changing in ways that are completely unknown and uncontrollable is alarming and a source of fear, one of the only ways that movies scare me.
This isn't it, it's just filming trash and shit and putting it under the genre of horror which it isn't. Fuck you, Netflix, for distributing this to people.
Here's the credits song so this wasn't a complete waste of time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z8MX9u9qiQ
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