User Reviews

So the whole point of this movie was that we're watching it being filmed from a police car camera. It might be one unbroken shot, or maybe several very long ones, which would have required some careful staging. But even if you thought the technique was clever, there really isn't much to the story to make it worth sitting through. Like other reviewers, I found it IMPOSSIBLE to get through this without fast forwarding. There were many long stretches that felt very repetitive. It didn't bother me so much that this took place at night in the woods, but if the filmmakers really wanted to make an impression, they should have given us more to care about. Put something interesting in there to look at, give us some memorable moments. The story was about an alien invasion. This was played out by having people walking around like zombies and spreading the infection/virus by putting their mouths to the next victim's ear. I barely remember how this movie ended because I had so little interest by the time it came. I think this movie needed a few more good ideas to have been worth making.

With ROPE, which was based on the stage play, Alfred Hitchcock tried to shoot an entire movie from a single point of view, without cutting away any more than was absolutely necessary (reloading the camera being the primary reason necessary cuts had to be camouflaged); the result was a movie that resembled a stage play. The opening sequence of TOUCH OF EVIL was rightfully hailed as a filmmaking triumph (see the restored version). The first-person (subjective) point of view was used to good effect in LADY IN THE LAKE, as well as THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT; it's always a viable option (I feel), especially for low budget filmmakers. The very first thing I ever saw on a Public Access Channel was a walking tour of a nearby neighborhood: the cameraman turned on his camcorder and just started walking through this neighborhood. At one point, he encountered a small dog outside an apartment door. He ended up getting into a car and placing the camera on his dashboard (or mounting it on his shoulder; I forget which) and videotaped his drive along a main thoroughfare. It was mesmerizing (which shows you just how easily entertained I am). I couldn't wait to get my hands on a camcorder. The only real problem I have with INVASION (or INFECTION, or whatever it's called these days) is the lackluster acting; the 60 minute travelogue footage I can live with: it reminded me of getting lost in just such an area when I was driving a cab several years ago. There was radio contact with the dispatcher, but there was no map of the area I was in, so I just had to drive around, at night, searching for the fare I'd been sent to pick up. Gas was running out quick, and there was nothing that even remotely looked like a service station in the area. (If you don't think that being lost on a back road at night is scary, you've never been lost on a back road at night.) The handful of houses I glimpsed off in the darkness looked like something straight out of THE Texas CHAINSAW MASSACRE. Again, with tighter performances, I think that this one could've been a winner; as is, not a bad try.

I spotted the DVD on a store near my home, and since I'm a "cheesy horror movie/alien flicks" addict, I wondered how good it was. It even had two award mentions on the cover (I don't remember what festival it won) so I figured "Hey this might be good". So I bought it (for five euros) and I came here to IMDb to check out some reviews. Here, either people bashed the movie to say it was bad, or people said the movie was a wonderful feat in indie movies bla, bla. I then played the DVD, not thinking about any review I had read, with an open mind, and not expecting anything at all.

Man... I don't' like being this critical, but the movie was genuinely bad... OK, I'm just going to give out some pointers of what I thought:

1-Acting/dialog: The acting was so confusing... sometimes the actors did a decent job, but there were scenes were I could spot no effort at all from them! The dialog was even worst... I think it was probably the aspect I most disliked in the whole movie. The talking in between characters seemed... off. Not just bad, but far away from the actual happenings in the movie. The monologues of the female character, although well delivered, became boring and annoying in a little while... But of course the most ridiculous aspect was the... "aliens" or the "infected"... I wont even comment on that one, just going to say that it was absolutely ridiculous and took the entire mood away from the picture; 2-Visuals: the strongest aspect in the movie... if you forget the awful FX and light flashes they used to simulate explosions or what the hell they were supposed to be. The "camera in car" aspect was quite cool actually, but they didn't even used the environment to inspire fear or dread. They left that to cheap sound and video FX and the three "infected" characters. The movie becomes boring in so many scenes...; 3-Sound: Talk about editing... this movie has no problems in showing how weakly edited it was. From computer sounds imitating the forest animals to the "alien dialog"... ah...

So what did I like in the movie... (SPOILERS) the only thing I really liked and it was actually quite scary was the succession of two scenes where the car is still and you spot something/someone walking in a distant. At first I really thought it was me seeing things, but when the character realizes that the "figures" coming towards her were her own reflection, I was surprised! Pretty creepy idea done well! Apart from that... I had an awful time.

And I don't recommend this to anyone... not even "teen get together" because you can't even laugh at this...

I give it a solid 2. Only some technical achievements worked here... apart from that... yeah... nothing

This is the first review I felt compelled to post. Maybe I can save someone else from wasting 81 minutes. This movie made my list for the 5 worst movies ever made. If you liked the Blair Witch you might give Infection one star. The whole movie is shot from the point of view of a dash cam in a police car driving up and down the same stretch of road in a park. The sound effects are puzzling (cats growling??!!) and seeing how the infection is spread makes you wonder how the first guy became infected (at that point in the movie you are looking for anything to make sense). This movie makes you want to throw things at your TV. Someone wasted $35,000 - don't waste your time.

I realized before watching this movie that it was an amateur film, the budget was low, and the acting was not going to be top notch. However, this wasn't the case with this movie. Rather this movie was was prime, grade A garbage! First of all, the most basic laptops have video editing equipment. This movie wasn't edited in any way. I realize the director was attempting to do something different by making a (supposedly) constant, no break or cut in the film. Newsflash: it didn't work. Camera tricks could've been used to make it APPEAR that there were no breaks in the film like what Alfred Hitchcock did in his movie, 'Rope'. Would've made a quicker paced, evenly flowed film.

Next, why is there a music score in a film that is supposedly 'reality'? It was completely out of place. Such films like The Blair Witch, Crow's Next, VHS doesn't have one. If this wasn't shot in the manner that it was in, then a musical score would've been acceptable. But in this case, it jacked up the movie even more.

Lastly, the atrocious acting the dragged on like fingernails on a blackboard. It seemed as if the actors weren't responding appropriately to the post production audio. It was such distraction, it was so laughable.

In conclusion: this is a 'D' movie that isn't worth watching to laugh or make fun at; it's really just a waste of time.

The premise sounded interesting. A horror flick from the perspective of a dash cam. Hmm, I thought. Let's give it a try.

After the first 20 minutes I thought, okay, this is one of those films meant to be bad, like Sharknado. A film not meant to be taken seriously. A joke. That's it. A joke film.

It consists entirely of driving slowly down a dirt road back and forth... back and forth. At short intervals there were a couple of people stumbling and lurching around like teens playing zombies at Holloween. Then more slow driving up the dirt road... and back... for an hour.

I actually laughed out loud when the annoying girl in the dress started stamping her feet and yelling at the walkie talkie while in front of the car. She looked like my daughter at eight being told, "Get that room cleaned." I continued to think this film was a joke until I looked up the reviews to read how entertaining the movie made to be bad was. Then I realized it wasn't a joke. This was an actual film. Really? An actual film meant to be taken seriously. Well, okay.... In that case, I wish there were a -10 rating I could give it.

I'm going to have to show hubby this one. I won't warn him. I'll just watch him watch it. Now that will be entertaining. :-)

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.

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

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.

Okay, first I should say that I assume this was just made by a group of friends with a limited budget. With that in mind, it really shouldn't be compared to blockbuster features and my rating would be higher. But still...

After giving it a chance, it still violated some basic film-making rules to such an extent that both the viewer and the amateur director in me cringed. A LOT.

Think: Blair Witch in a car but REALLY boring.

Think: You left your camcorder on the dashboard and recorded yourself getting lost in the park at night for an hour, then making your friends watch it.

The scariest part (POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT... IF SPOILING HERE IS POSSIBLE) was at one point the picture rewinds and you might think you will have to watch it all over again. SCARY.

Silliness aside, this is a pretty good idea for a low-budget lets-go-make-a-movie-tonight film. But the concept walks a fine line between being really good and really bad, and let's just say it wasn't really good. There were just too many parts where nothing happened. At first I thought that was the director's plan -- you were supposed to be lulled into a sense of security and then really scary things would start happening. But...no.

I kept trying to find good things to say about it (and I had plenty of time to think), and I'll say the music was kinda cool. And I have to give the female lead credit for standing around by herself looking scared for a really, really long time. But that's it. The actors playing "infected" people looked as if they were making fun of zombie movies. Or they got their motivation from the Bug wearing his Edgar suit from "MIB." Chances are, if for some strange reason you're going to watch this movie, it's on DVD or Tivo, so you can fast forward it whenever waiting for something to happen gets too difficult.

I hate to be so critical of something, but at the same time I've watched a lot of similar movies and nothing has ever been this painful. If they just chopped a half an hour out of it and added some scary stuff, it might be decent. Maybe that'll be the director's cut...

I am still laughing, just because I wasted twenty minutes watching this before coming to IMDb to rate it.

As a filmmaker myself, I can't even imagine sitting through watching Infection at a free film festival.

I am laughing in part because it's the only film I have ever seen with an IMDb credit that has a single non-stop camera without more than a handful of cuts.

If there is ever an award for worst film, this could be the winner.

The film begins with five or six minutes of on screen text dialog to set things up. Again, I have never seen a feature film begin with page after page of text set-up.

The first footage that appears, looks like it is filmed on a PXL 2000 Fisher Price Camera and tinted in green, the acting is poor and it has a 1970's feel about it. (Its supposedly 2006)

The viewer is then treated to a unfathomable amount of landscape and night driving on a road, illuminate with only headlights, and presented in a drivers point of view. This continues for 15 minutes an ADR (Audio Dialogue Replacement) of the main character (who you do not see), engages in a conversation with a supposed dispatch person who eventually appears in a In-Picture framing.

At this point in the film, you might feel like shooting yourself in the head to escape the misery, but instead, you will continue watching this barbaric deviancy in hopes of a scene change; you just get more of the same.

Eventually the vehicle comes to a stop, you get to see the main character, view horrible acting with horrible storyline dialog until he returns to the vehicle in search of more awful characters to annoy you with.

Suddenly you will finally realize, this film just wasted a significant period of your existence on planet earth and hit the stop button.

Obviously, the writer, producer and director have never attended film school. All the rules they teach in filmmaking level A are broken in the first 5 minutes of the set-up text.

That being said, despite being the worst film ever credited and featured on IMDb, there is still hope for anyone who can make a feature film, get it into a festival, have it on DVD, etc.

It may not be much hope, but everyone has to start somewhere.

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.

That's what threw me off.

The natural assumption is that the Director is serious. So, not long into the movie, I turned the thing off, thinking that the movie sucked. Terribly acted and stupid, with the lead actress doing her Nancy Kerrigan impression, wailing 'Why me?' But, the next night I turned it back on, wondering if it would get any better. It didn't. It got worse. That's when it occurred to me - This is brilliant. It's a parody, but you're not supposed to know it. Kind of like The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, but more subtle. I wrestled with this thought throughout the whole movie - What if it's not intended to be bad on purpose? Then, I'm an idiot for watching it. But, what if, just what if it's intended to be the worst movie ever made? Then, that makes me the smart one for getting it and and forcing myself to watch it, kind of like Alex in A Clockwork Orange.

I then watched the credits at the end, so I would know who to blame. Interestingly, they never ended. They're still rolling. Check it out. Don't watch the movie. Just watch the credits.

One more thing - Next time you are trying to get out of the woods and there is only one way out and an infected zombie is in your way, drive around him or run him over.

I give this movie a 4, if only because there was one spot that made me jump out of my jammies, and that usually gives any movie I rate 3 stars or so. They get another star for doing this movie in one continual shot, unlike other 'cam' movies. Not sure what to say about the acting. Amazing though that at no point did they break out into uncontrollable laughter. In a way, this looks like it could have been a high school or college project. There are some inconsistencies that didn't make a lot of sense, for example, cell phones not working (c'mon Verizon!) yet two-way voice/video between police vehicle and police station functioning, to some extent anyway. And, I do have to ask, but why do people always get 'invaded' or 'infested' through the ear? I think Star Trek did that, one time is enough. Not sure what to make of the 'ghosting' parts. That part is never explained. (actually, nothing is explained) Also, does rural California look like that? It looks like something you'd see in the Great Lakes area, it reminded me of the sorta crappy roads you get in Ontario when you're by Lake Huron. Word has it that if you watch the 15 minutes of credits (really, 15 minutes!) you get no additional information. Anyway, the only recommendation I can make to the producers of this movie, if they're reading this review, when doing a dash-cam movie, mount the cam a little higher. I really don't need to see the hood of the police vehicle for an hour. Also, what cop wears jeans while on duty? They do sell blue or black work pants at Wal-Mart. I'm not a movie producer, so I won't critique anything else. But, just saying, the girl gets a real nice prom dress..surely $30 pants from Wal-Mart or Marks Work Warehouse wouldn't have broken the bank.

I found this as a used rental, and only had a vague knowledge of the plot. I was actually quite surprised at the overall quality of the movie. It helps a lot if you know in advance that the movie is something of a gimmick, shot entirely on a dash-mounted cruiser cam. If you're alright with that aspect of it, it's probably going to live up to your expectations. Most of my complaints are the end result of this style. There are long stretches of the movie where nothing happens, which would make sense, as this is supposed to be shot in real time. There are also a lot of repetitive moments; Girl tries to escape park, cars/infected block road, girl screams, frantic driving away. Some of the acting is questionable, such as the doctor we meet only as a voice, his accent felt pretty fake. I initially disliked the heroine and the deputy over the radio, though they did win me over by the end of the movie. There are also a few underwhelming cg effects, which occasionally give away the budget restrictions, but they keep them brief and they're mainly used to better convey what's happening when someone is infected. Most of the story is told through voice-overs and sound effects, and at parts it feels like a radio drama, which made the movie effectively creepy in parts. The film is almost entirely lit by headlights(probably augmented by spotlights), and if you've never been stranded in the middle of nowhere with only some shaky headlights, you'll know how spooky that can get at night. It's not a perfect movie, but it kept me engaged, and considering how this movie was shot and the movie spent on it, I was genuinely impressed, and I wondered how much better this would have fared if they had released it under a less generic title.