Contracted (2013) Review

So it's been a while since my last (real) review. Last week was my spring break from college, so I decided to just not do anything at all, including writing reviews. Anyways, I watched Contracted over the break.

I have mixed feelings about this movie, but we'll get to that a bit later. First, the plot.

The almost unbelievably attractive Najarra Townsend plays a lesbian named Sam who drunkenly hooks up with a man at a party in the back of his car. Throughout the next 3 days, she starts to develop an unknown disease, which slowly rots away her body, resulting in every aspect of her life going wrong in the short span of those 3 days. I don't think I'm spoiling anything here by saying that she's turning into a zombie. I think people can figure that out just based on the cover. 

Huh. I didn't know Two-Face from Batman had a sister.

However, that's where one of the problems I have with this movie arises. You see, it is never explained how she got this zombifying disease. Yes, she had unprotected sex with that stranger at the party, but if he had the disease, he would've become a zombie as well, and we never hear anything about that in the entire movie. In fact, he's only brought up twice after the party, and we never see him again past the party scene in the beginning. There's also this sub-plot where Sam is growing some kind of rare exotic flower in her room to enter into a flower competition. Now, if you're like me, you probably think that these flowers are what makes the disease and she contracts it through being around them. That would also make sense because they're apparently foreign and very rare. Nope. That goes out the window when she goes to the competition in zombie-mode and they kick her out. 

The other problem I have with this movie is the fact that nobody around this girl seems to notice that she's turning into a zombie. Seriously. Whenever she shows her rotten face to anyone, they just say "You should go to the doctor and get that checked out". I don't know if these people are living in a world where zombies and zombie movies don't exist, but that seems highly unlikely. It's more likely that they're just stupid. 

Oh cool! I didn't know Lil' Wayne was in this movie!

The third and final nitpick is that none of this girl's friends or family seem to care about her well-being. Throughout this movie, her lesbian girlfriend breaks up with her because of the whole "I banged a guy in the backseat of his car last night" thing, her boss makes her come into work even after she calls in and tells him that she needs to deal with a medical emergency and then he makes her continue to work even after he sees how her flesh is literally falling off of her face and into the salad she's making. That's not all. The worst offender is her own mother. Sam lives with her mother and she's been in trouble before for having a drug problem, so naturally, when Sam comes to her mother for help with her flesh-deteriorating medical illness, her mom just assumes that she's back into drugs and tells her to go to rehab. No, wait, it gets better. Sam will then try to tell her mother that it's a medical problem and her mother just calls her a liar until Sam gets fed up and storms out. Now, that would be alright if it happens once. You know, adds some family drama and all that. But no, it happens THREE times in the movie! Instead of helping her to understand and hopefully get rid of her appearance-altering condition, everybody Sam goes to just brushes her off, and in a mean way, too. 

Wait a minute...

Okay, so what's good about this movie? Well, for one, the plot is extremely original. This is the first time I've ever seen a zombie movie where the zombie retains all of its humanity until the third day of infection, when the zombification completely takes over. Even though she looks like a zombie, Sam could still walk, talk, and do anything else a normal human could do. Usually in zombie movies, the person dies and comes back as a zombie, or when we're dealing with "infected" zombies, like this movie, the infection is spread by bites and scratches. Not this movie. Even though it didn't full explain in the movie, it's heavily implied that this disease is spread through sexual contact. There was a reviewer on RottenTomatoes who hit the nail on the head. He said "This movie does to unprotected sex what Jaws did to beaches". I couldn't explain it any better myself. It reminds me a lot of a book called Ravenous, where a werewolf epidemic breaks out in a small town, and instead of a curse or a gene, the werewolf factor is spread through sex. 

Gives a whole new meaning to "doggy style"

The actors are also incredibly good all through this movie. Najarra Townsend is terrific as the young and confused girl who can't figure out what's wrong with her, and Caroline Williams as the overbearing mother reminds me a bit of Piper Laurie in Carrie. There's also a slew of side characters who are all portrayed amazingly. 

The ad campaign for this movie had people watch it and then snap a picture of them being grossed out by something gross happening in the movie and send it in to the producers to be put in a collage. However, the gore and gross-out effects in the movie aren't all that great. It's nothing I haven't seen before. Well, I lied. I definitely haven't seen a human-zombie sex scene where the human male pulls out to ejaculate, only to find his penis covered in maggots. That was a nice touch. 

I also found myself sympathizing with the main character near the end of the movie, when she just accepts the fact that nobody is going to help her and she just silently embraces the illness. There's a great scene where she dresses up and puts makeup on her zombie face, almost like she's enjoying her last shred of humanity before she dies. And I gotta give the makeup department for this movie extreme props. They somehow managed to make a zombie woman look dead sexy in that scene. 

Pun most definitely intended.

Overall, Contracted wasn't too good, but it wasn't terrible either. It kind of balances itself out with the good parts and the bad parts. The director of this movie said himself that he thinks it's an awful movie, but that's to be expected with artists of any kind. Most of the time, if you create something artistic, you end up hating it eventually. That's why Slash hates playing Sweet Child O' Mine, or why the singer from Semisonic will straight up refuse to play Closing Time at concerts. Anyway, this movie was pretty average to me. I give it 6 maggot-infested vaginas out of a possible 10. I was planning on giving it a 4, but Najarra Townsend is just too attractive to warrant that kind of rating. 

Marry me.