Wednesday 10 February 2010

Infestation Not Causing Any Tremors



Infestation is a competently directed, adequately produced comedy horror that's obviously shot on the streets of Vancouver. As such it often has the feeling of a U.S. TV show...slick but not very cinematic. It stars Chris Marquette as a standard issue geek/slacker who hates his boring office job and has issues with his ex-military father, a cool Ray Wise. After arriving at work and immediately being sacked, he. and everybody else in the world fall unconscious...only to awake to find aggressive giant bugs over-running the cities.

This falls into the category of "nice try...but not good enough". It wants to be an all round comedy horror like Tremors or Eight Legged Freaks...movies that balanced the thrills with great characters and smart humor. But Infestation's thrills aren't big enough. The cast aren't memorable enough and the humour just doesn't quite hit the mark...although you can see it's trying really really hard. This gets points for being a competent, well meaning horror movie (with bonus points for Ray Wise, the legend that is). But it's a bit like eating a McDonalds; it might taste OK at the time...but it doesn't taste like meat, no matter how hard the scary Ronald McClown might be trying to convince you otherwise.

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