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This is my blog, and it is dangerous. Do you think I want to die like this?





Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Contracted

I think I just got tricked into watching a zombie movie, guys. Netflix can convince me to watch a lot of strange things, and I really do like strange, but this was akin to discovering a bag of garbage that's been sitting hidden in your shed for a year. What's this? Old Christmas ornaments? Clothes for donation? No. Just a sack full of moist, gnarly detritus and something wiggling a little.

Samantha (Najarra Townsend) is a strangely beautiful girl who is embarrassingly obsessed with her ex-girlfriend Nikki (Katie Stegeman) - an ostensibly English girl - who behaves toward Sam as though she's continually just turned up at her door, trying to offer her an issue of The Watchtower. Nikki's attitude toward her ranges from a bored obligation to converse to thinly-veiled bored hostility.

The story begins with Sam attending a house party of her friend Alice (Alice Macdonald) with absolutely no desire to socialize or drink, and practically walking around announcing to anyone who will listen that she's a lesbian, duh. Naturally, she gets intensely hammered and has sexual intercourse in a car with a man named BJ (Simon Barrett) whom I can only describe as extremely blurry.

Take that, nice guy Riley (Matt Mercer), how dare you try to act like a normal, decent dude with no intentions of slipping a roofie to the object of your affection.

As you can deduce from the poster, Sam begins to get very ill, over the course of three short days. This is where the film goes from dopey to inexplicable. It's not just the fact that her outward severity of symptoms change drastically back and forth between scenes (one moment her left eye is salmon colored, the next completely opaque white, then back again) it's also how mildly everyone is reacting to a person who looks like she's in the early stages of late-stage leprosy. More than half the time, they don't even seem to notice the funk emanating from her like sickness stink lines in a cartoon.

She's also acting very suspiciously. Just walking around being the most conspicuously suspicious character in the vicinity. Plus, I can't imagine a doctor would be presented with a previously healthy, young woman who is suddenly bleeding like a stuck pig, has a severe rash starting in her genitals which branches upward, and an extremely low heart-rate and not send her to the emergency room. I don't even think this "doctor" Googled her symptoms. My quick search indicates that best-case scenario, noticeable bradycardia can mean she's really damned dehydrated. Instead of telling her to drink some Gatorade, he merely suggests that she lotion up her vagina, because ew, there's a lot of dry, dead skin on it.

During her second visit, when the iris of her right eye has turned completely red and the left has gone pink, he's all, "Well, it looks bad, but what can we do? Just gotta wait for the test results. Definitely looks like an infection, but I have to find out exactly which one before I can give you some antibiotics. I'll have my nurse call you after the labs are back. Oh, and you're probably really contagious, so try to just ... stay away from other people while you wait."

She's a waitress, and he doesn't even advise her not to go into work with her crazy, sometimes bleeding eyeballs and touch people's salad greens with her bare, blood-caked fingernails. Her own boss (E-Kan Soong) sees this shit and is like, "Oh man, that looks pretty terrible. I'll call someone to cover your shift, you just wait here in the completely un-staffed, gleaming kitchen near all the stuff we don't want contaminated by anything that oozes."

Even after Sam hears from Alice that the police are looking for a mysterious guy from the party, she still doesn't care that her teeth, hair and nails are falling off her body - what's most important is keeping Nikki from hearing that she's had sex with a dude.

Sam's own mother (Caroline Williams) appears to be more concerned with the weak subplot of her daughter being a recovering heroin addict. Aren't you looking right at her, mom?! She's vomiting blood all over your clean bathroom!

The grossness persists and escalates. She tries to kiss three people (two of whom let her) with a sore at the corner of her mouth, grey, rotting teeth, and what has to be some galloping morning death breath. I might be a little fussy, but I don't want to touch mouths with someone who has spinach stuck in their teeth, even if they do have a cute, interesting nose.

There's no reason to watch this film. It's ridiculous, yet even with the "here's my motivation, see?" acting and unrealistic, "man, you look like shit, are you feeling well?" reactions to physical decay, it's still not over-the-top enough to truly be a work of unintentional art. Your time might be better spent writing haikus about your lover's burrito farts, or digging that gunk from under your fingernails.

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2 comments:

Dogs On Drugs said...

"Lotion up your vagina"

I don't think that guy was a doctor.

Unknown said...

I was even more disturbed when she actually went home, applied random bathroom-found HAND LOTION to her VAGINA and made faces when it stung.