Well here's a blast from the past. Way back in the distant days of 2015, I reviewed a little film called Contracted. The film was about a young woman, Sam, who contracts a necrotic STI after being drugged and raped at a party, and told the story of how Sam's body rotted away in parallel to her relationships with those around her. The film was body horror to the extreme and was quite effective in that area, even if it didn't really make Sam a particularly relatable character. Now here we are with the sequel to that movie, Contracted: Phase II.
Contracted: Phase II gives the spotlight to Riley, a secondary character from the first film who had a crush on Sam and finally got to have sex with her near the end of the film, before discovering that her nethers were full of maggots/worms. Lovely. From that and some scratches Sam gave him during the act, Riley is now infected with the same necrotic STI, and only has three days before he succumbs to it and becomes a zombie. He decides to use his remaining time to try to track down BJ, the man who raped Sam and gave her the STI in the beginning, and who's apparently been quite busy infecting prostitutes with the same STI and recording rants on tapes to send to the FBI about how he wants to eradicate humanity with his plague. As noble as Riley's quest to stop BJ before he dies is, however, he ends up inadvertently making matters worse as this disease can be passed on via any bodily fluid or physical contact, such as sharing a kiss or drinking from the same glass as him, and so he's creating more victims as he desperately searches for BJ. Will Riley be able to find and stop BJ before it's too late for him, and will BJ's plans come to fruition?
Contracted: Phase II has something for everyone (to be disgusted by). Vomiting! Pus! Teeth falling out! Eye trauma! Maggots/superworms coming out of various bodily orifices and being cut out of flesh! Abscesses! Self-surgery! Cold sores! People expelling massive amounts of blood via the nose or by peeing! People consuming food that has someone's blood in it without noticing! Much like the first film, Phase II is a body horror film, with the focus being on seeing and experiencing your body rotting from the inside out while you're still alive. That's a horrifying concept for sure, and so from that perspective alone Contracted: Phase II can be said to be a roaring success. Certainly, I don't recommend watching this film while eating anything with nacho cheese (shades of the custard scene in Braindead...) It's also an interesting and semi-original take on the zombie movie, looking at things not from the perspective of people trying to survive an already-started zombie apocalypse, but from the perspective of the very first victims of the zombie plague, before the dead have really started to rise en masse and people are still trying to figure out what is happening.
However...
If you read my review of the first thing, Contracted, and then read this review, you might notice that they're a little bit... similar. that's because the two films are very similar, in both themes and in plot, with the only differences being a different main character, a few more people getting accidentally infected, and a little bit of backstory given to antagonist BJ. Hell, even though they're different people, Riley's reaction to discovering he's infected and that his body is rotting while he's still alive is pretty much exactly the same as Sam's - a mixture of denial and refusal to seek help for their condition. I'm sorry, but I don't care how determined I might be to find the person responsible for the disease that's killing me, the very moment I fill a toilet bowl to the brim with my blood that I peed into it, I'm checking myself straight into the nearest hospital, probably at speed and while screaming incoherently. Then again, the people around Riley seem pretty clueless as well, not noticing when his nose abruptly explodes with blood while at a wake for Alice (who was killed by Sam in the first film). An argument could be made that it's just another symptom of the self-centredness of so many of the people around both Riley and Sam, but if that's the case then it's gone too far into Flanderization.
The other big difference in this film is that we get to learn more about BJ and his plans, but unfortunately he's been Flanderized as well, as well as beaten by the stupid stick. His plan to be a walking plague vector is all well and good and makes sense for a genocidal antagonist - if you need to infect a lot of people quickly with a zombie virus that can be passed via sex, then prostitutes are the way to go - but why on Earth does he decide to stalk and taunt Riley when he's not recording his manifesto in his house full of chained-up zombie prostitutes? He's also got a finger tattoo that says "Abbadon", but that's something that's left hanging until the very end, when someone else with the same tattoo is revealed and we're left with a setup hook for a Phase III.
There's also a sub-plot with a detective (whose actress tries and fails to hide her Scottish accent throughout the film, which was a little distracting) also trying to track down BJ that just feels like it's there to have someone else periodically remind Riley and us that there are far more sensible options than what Riley does throughout the movie. And in the end, that's really what Contracted: Phase II is - a repeat of the first film with some different characters and most of the same body horror spots. Still relatively good and original, but also still failing in some of the same ways as the first film.
Comments