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I love this movie so much

To me, this movie is perfection.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

I watched this god-awful mess for 20 minutes and all I saw was footage of a country road. That's it. Nothing else. Country road. That's it.I thought my DVR was broken and it was showing the same footage over and over. But nope. It was just country road. For twenty minutes. That's it. Nothing else.So I started fast forwarding. Know what I saw? Country road. That's it. Nothing else.For an hour!! Country road. Just country road.Oh, and every once in a while, we'd see some REALLY bad actors. That's it. Then more country road. Nothing else.Finally, the end credits appear. And know what I saw? Albert Pyun. That's right. This absolute POS was directed by Albert (PeeYoo) Pyun. No surprise. None at all.Now I see why his name wasn't shown until the end. Because every human being with any sense at all would have turned the damn thing off if ol' Albert's name had had appeared in the beginning.Country road. And Albert Pyun.You know, most directors get better over the years. Not Albert. Oh no. His films have gotten worse and worse. And his budgets have gotten smaller and smaller. I think this one must have cost MAYBE ten bucks to make. Forty if you count gas money so that car could just drive and drive for a full hour over a country road.Wow. I left my video camera on by mistake one day and shot 37 minutes of an oscillating fan. And even THAT was more fascinating and suspenseful than this dash-cam video.jk90

I made the mistake of giving my good friend Mr. Chark the remote control at 1 AM last night, and per usual he immediately shot for the OnDemand Menu, where he then proceeded to navigate to the FearNet page. For those of you not in the know, FearNet is a free movie channel devoted to delivering only the highest quality and most spooktastic films created. The night prior I had tossed the remote to him and we ended up on 'Boogeyman,' a 2005 spookfest starring 7th Heaven's Barry Watson. I didn't make it to the end of that one, but I'll take Mr. Chark's word for it and believe that it was not only spooky, but good.Mr. Chark's process for choosing FearNet films is based on two parameters: the year created and the first sentence of the movie description. If the film has been created prior to 1980, or the description does not spook Mr. Chark out by the end of the first sentence ('A meteor/spaceship crashes...' 'A spaceship crashes...' 'A house/young girl is terrorized...' 'A monster/plague/horde of bats is unleashed...' etc) he will be inclined to select another.In the case of 'Invasion'--or 'Infection' if you've managed to find this page, for which I commend you on your efforts--the 2005 copyright date was really all Mr. Chark needed to convince us and himself that this film would contain believable special effects and an all-around spookiness that only comes with contemporary horror films.We were initially dissatisfied with the opening shots of the film, which consisted of 2-3 minutes of text fading in and out, but afterward we realized that the editing software used for the film was probably incapable of scrolling text (an assessment later reinforced by a 15 minute closing credit sequence that also did not incorporate a scroll). Easily forgivable. However, the second shot of the film was slightly less forgivable, in that it may or may not have been shot with a Gameboy Camera.The third shot was probably the biggest mistake of the entire film, as it was not only bad, but it also comprised the remainder of the ~70 minutes of footage. Mr. Chark maintained that it would be a good spookfest, though, so we continued to watch.We believed him for the first 15 minutes of said shot, which consisted of a police-cruiser-outfitted-with-an-HD camera driving a stretch of forest road. There were meteors falling sporadically, indicated by the dashboard camera inverting colors for a split-second.The use of suspenseful music was questionable, as one would believe that a self-described 'true' POV film wouldn't need music unless it was actually diagetic in nature (a la Cloverfield, Blair Witch, mode, etc). Maybe the two characters were just blasting FearNet on SiriusXM.There's a lot that makes sense in this movie. It's probably what would be a fairly realistic account of what driving back and forth across the same patch of forest for an hour would be like: long periods of silence, periodic mumbling that does nothing to advance the character or plot.The 'Invasion' itself is also pretty realistic. Imagine if four people drove into the woods, and three of those four were then infected through their ear canal by an alien slug (it is now evident that the the writer and director films are young enough to have read Animorphs). Once infected, the alien's tactic for spreading itself is to stagger slowly, as if with palsy, and aggressively hug its next victim.All that being said, the fourth uninfected human really just has to not be within arms' reach of any of the three infected people in the woods and she'll survive, which she can easily accomplish my walking briskly away from them at any point. She manages to do this for the majority of the film, which consequently means that the viewer will watch the same night-vision shot of an unmoving forest road for up to twenty minutes at a time.Every so often we get auditory glimpses of what's going on outside the forest in the nearby town. The infection spreads there, lots of gunfire. This is relayed via radio transmission.The best analogy we could come up for this was if 'Cloverfield' had been shot in Westchester from the point of view of a PlayStation Move camera, in which the subject is receiving text messages from a friend from NYC.The scares were not good. I almost would have preferred things jumping out of the woods to startle me (I am a major wuss, though, so I'm glad they didn't), but it was clear that the actors had neither the physical prowess nor the coordination to work that into the script. At one point they make a big emphasis of what I took to be a bird taking a dump on the car's windshield. Is that spooky? Sort It's a bad movie. Real bad. Bad to do. Not even that spooky. I was upset. We were all a little upset. I wish we had watched Super Mario Brothers instead. That's free OnDemand, too.I feel like on a normal review scale, 'Invasion' shouldn't register. However, I review on the Mr. Chark's Spook Scale, which puts this film at a lofty 2. While it is a miserable, half-aborted idea for a movie, it can't be the worst thing on FearNet by any means. Until he finds that movie, Mr. Chark will search on.

Here is a fantastic concept for a film - a series of meteors crash into a small town and the resulting alien infection is caught on a deputy's single camera dash cam as the town slowly taken over. Leave it to Albert Pyun to screw that up! Don't get within 100 feet of this flick! Holy crap, what a bomb...it might be Pyun's worst yet! The crazy thing is there is the germ of a creative idea in here - an entire of an outbreak told from the POV of a dashcam. When I heard that a while back, I imagined the car smashing into stuff, people getting run over, and infected types breaking the windshield and surrounding the car in chaos. That would be cool right? Instead, we have the lead driving around in circles for the entire time in a wooded area, occasionally running into the three infected types who just stand there. The last bit is literally a 15 minute shot where nothing happens in front of the camera, just noises are heard offscreen. Stay away!!! On a somewhat relieving note, I think I am officially calling an end to my Pyun watching...only took me 20 crappy movies to realize I have better things to do.

The Hawaian born director Albert Pyun has a somewhat dubious reputation. Some call him a plain bad film-maker, others praise his work for his offbeat screenplays and his often use of rather impressive steady-cam shots. But regardless all that, Pyun developed quite a lot of fans with his apocalyptic 'cyborg'-movies. And his movie RADIOACTIVE DREAMS even won the Golden Raven at the 5th Brussels International Festival Of Fantastic Film in 1987. I think that last fact should make people think twice before calling him a bad director.His newest film, INFECTION, shows a very different Pyun at work and this movie simply can not be compared with any of his previous efforts. INFECTION could be described as a cross between a 'virus outbreak movie' and an 'alien invasion movie'. Perhaps more accurate would be: THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT meets THE X-FILES. Above all, INFECTION really is a true cinematic 'tour-de-force', because the movie consists of only one single, continuous shot (plus a little pro- and epilogue). That 63 minutes long shot is filmed with a high definition surveillance camera mounted on the dashboard of a police-car.The story goes like this: A meteor, containing an aggressive alien virus, crashes on earth a few minutes before midnight near a little town called Lawton. Larry Jenkins, a local farmer, alerts the police through the radio. When inspector Bardo arrives, Jenkins infects him with the alien virus. Bardo then takes his car and drives away. He runs into the young couple Timmy and Cheryl. Bardo infects the unsuspecting Timmy, and Cheryl takes off with the police-car. She now must survive the long cold night while the virus is spreading rapidly amongst the local population. All these events are filmed from the police-car and take place in a wide forest-like park during one night. A lot of background information to the story is given through conversations we hear over the police-radio.It is simply amazing how this movie, with seemingly one boring point of view from the camera, can tell such an intriguing and thrilling story. The occasional special effects and sounds-capes, added in post-production, help to make the movie a bit more captivating. The omni-present darkness has a claustrophobic and, a the same time, hypnotic effect. When watching this on a big screen in a theater, the viewer, at one point or another, might even begin to see things that aren't really there. Pyun cleverly accentuated this effect while editing the movie.INFECTION is an exclusive but very successful experience, that almost wasn't even completed. The actual shooting of the movie took seven continuous hours. There was enough budget for only five takes. The actors sometimes had to wait a few hours before the camera would arrive at their location. When the previous four takes were all messed-up even within the first half of the shot, everybody began fearing the worst: it seemed impossible to shoot this movie. But miraculously, the final take went without any problems and INFECTION was history. Because of that fact alone, the movie is worth seeing and gets an extra point (If you're wondering how I got all this information: I talked to the director at the festival's 2006 edition). Although INFECTION certainly isn't for everyone, I myself enjoyed the movie much more than the over-hyped BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. Albert Pyun has once again proved that you don't always need a big budget to make a good movie. Sometimes a good idea and creative ways is all it takes. If you ask me: he is forgiven his previous failures and has surpassed himself with INFECTION.