Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

‘Infected’ opens with an eco-terrorist named Connie (Glenda Braganza) busting in on a multi national food conglomerate owned by Peter Whitfield (Bruce Dinsmore) because they are doing something eeeevvvvilll with their special hydropure drinking water. You see there’s some kind of weird plague going on in Boston, even though ‘Boston’ looks suspiciously like a large French speaking city in Canada, and there’s a precious few who seem to know that the Whitfield Corp is behind this nonsense. Damn… Connie just wasn’t careful enough because some of the security personal catch her while she was collecting evidence, but Connie knows Kung Fu AND she has a machete! Unfortunately for Connie her machete has revealed the truth about the Whitfield Group and Kung Fu just isn’t all that effective against lightning fast pincher possessing human devouring aliens. She was kinda cute too.

Nonetheless there’s still one more soul out there fighting for the survival of the human race and he has contacted Lisa, a hard working reporter at what I’m assuming is The ‘Boston’ Herald. This cat has gone the extra mile, for real, to get the truth to Lisa only to have his evidence in this matter fall to her ex-husband Ben (Gil Bellows), a reporter in the throwaway science fiction part of the paper, and somebody who Lisa seems to despise. Somehow these two are going to have to put aside their bad feelings, or at least Lisa is going to have put aside her bad feelings because Ben is still feeling the love, and together they need to get to the truth.

So they take this evidence they have to a scientist buddy of Ben’s who washes sperm for living… it’s complex… and he observes that there is something not quite cool with this sample and somehow our two reporters have stumbled onto the conclusion that aliens are taking over the world. Now it’s time to blow the lid off this sucker but these aliens are a crafty bunch with low folks in high places, and they simply can’t allow that to happen. The only hope the human race has is in a lone rogue alien named Malcolm (Judd Nelson) who has discovered that Ben, of all people, has the equivalent of alien bug repellent running through his veins and therein lies the cure.

Anyway stuff happens, damsel gets captured, folks die, aliens get really angry and now it’s up to Ben, all by himself, to save us all.

I guess a quick summation of this movie ‘Infected’ would be ‘I’ve seen worse’. It just so happens that I had just seen the pilot episode of the new ‘V’ television series remake, which is remarkably similar to the subject matter in this movie, with this movie having a subject matter that is remarkably similar to a bunch of other movies. What I guess separates this one from those other legions of body snatching, alien hiding, alien cowering, alien invading flicks is that this one is going the Aquafina-Dasani-Absopure route. Ingenious.

But after we get past the evil bottled water concept there’s really not a lot here to recommend for, or recommend against ‘Infected’ as it was about as generic as entertainment fare gets. The story follows convention, veering neither left or right, there are crazy plot holes and a lot of silliness embedded within this films narrative, but because its so generic it probably won’t bother you all that much because you’re not going to care one way or the other. The performances from the cast are certainly capable since Gil Bellows and Maxim Roy are fine actors, even though they probably take this movie a tad bit more seriously than it deserves.

Overall ‘Infected’ is inoffensive, innocuous entertainment that has aliens in it, a touch of kung fu, a little gore and occasionally doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it is perfect viewing for a lazy uneventful Saturday afternoon. For instance on the fall weekend I viewed this movie my options were watching this movie or raking leaves. ‘Infected’ beats raking leaves every single time. Unless I had to watch it a second time then yeah… I’d be a leaf raking fool.