Starring: Essie Davis, Sean Harris Directed by: Billy O'Brien
As last year's October reviews included the ever-popular Black Sheep, I wanted to make sure this year's batch had sufficient representation of mutant livestock flicks with Isolation.
This movie's first fault is spending pretty much no time on setup, other than a shady bovine geneticist is running the experiment. Its second fault is spending far too long on a calf birthing scene. I’ll be the first to admit I know nothing about animal husbandry, but the idea of swinging a newborn calf around one's head in a circle to get it to start breathing seems ludicrous. Apparently the calf didn't like it either, as it immediately bit off the caretaker's finger.
For safety's sake, the vet puts the calf down and decides to do an impromptu dissection. Inside they find enlarged organs as well as spiny little mutant fetuses encased in the calf's wombs. This experiment in highly accelerated bovine reproduction has already been a crashing failure – plus the vet warns there may be danger of infection.
It just gets better when one of the exoskeletal monsters slithers off the table and into a grand adventure of exponential growth. Sadly, the critter can't wreak much entertaining havoc when there are only four people – two of which have already been bitten – on the farm.
If you:
- Need an excuse to consider becoming a vegetarian
- Aim to reinforce a deep mistrust of what Patton Oswalt refers to as "Science: coulda, not shoulda"
- Need a cheesy monster thriller fix and are stranded without Syfy or a copy of Mosquito
Put it in the queue!
If you:
- Prefer filmmakers to actually put some effort into their monsters and have some pride in their craft rather than just showing some half-ass, fast-moving, partially visible critter
- Like continuous action
- Think a film ridiculous enough to have mutant cow fetuses running around feeding on cows and humans in order to rapidly grow should also include some creatively over-the-top death scenes
You will be very disappointed. Don't put it in the queue
Written by Jennifer Venson