Isolation
Mooooooo!
Posted by: ThirteenDamnDollars, September 12, 2005 08:58 PM
Billy O'Brien
Sunday September 11th, 11:59PM
Ryerson Theater
Oh the symbolism! Rife! It was Rife!
An evil big-city genetic scientist promises to pay a simple country farmer big money to conduct his immoral genetic experiments on the cows. The experiments literally corrupt the purity of nature, the money never actually appears and it's the farmer a dedicated but harried country vet and a couple of poor ittinerant citizens are left to clean up the mess.
Billy O'Brien knows the secret that a lot of big Hollywood creature feature directors don't. That it's a lot scarier to hint at the monster, showing it in darkness, always in the peripheral vision, sound effects off screen. The viewer's imagination, sufficently primed, and come up with horrors 100 times creepier than anything you can come up with in latex, animatronics or CGI.
Another nice dichotomy in this film is that while what the creature represents, and what it could do is terrifying, the creature itself is sort of pathetic. Only really threatening if events somehow (SOMEHOW) conspire to leave the characters crawling around cramped dark spaces or stranded in water.
This movie brings the scares and the fun.
Old MacDonald had a gene lab, E-I-E-I-Augh!
Posted by: Task, September 12, 2005 10:52 AM
Sunday, September 11 11:59 PM RYERSON
Very high production values in this rural thriller.
The best (and most important) character in the movie is the farm itself. It's an old rusty farm that's half drowned in the kind of thing you don't want to think about too closely. This set of buildings should probably be deserted, and the land would likely be a lot better off in the hands of a land developer, but the guy who runs it is too stubborn to give up just because things are difficult.
The farmer is the closest thing the movie has to a lead character, and he's good. It's actually very surprising when he makes a dumb move, but it ends up being important to the plot. He's in the best position to take on the "tough hero" role, but he doesn't do quite as well in that role as I'd hoped: I wasn't satisfied with his ending. It seemed kind of cheap. The other characters are well done, but you don't get quite as much depth as you do on him.
All in all, a fine movie with an interesting idea in it.
On to the plot! Slight spoilers follow...
The farmer (who used to be involved with the vet) has agreed to take payments from the genetecist in return for being able to use his cows to bear altered calf fetuses. The vet is the first person to realize that the experiment has gone Horribly Wrong, and she disappears. The farmer is a good solid fellow and tries to help the cow birth on his own, but it's a ridiculously difficult labour and he enlists the help of the two travellers who've been staying on his land. The two travellers are "in hiding" and figure this out of the way rural estate is a great place to be lost for a while.
You wouldn't think that a mutated baby calf would make for a good creature, but I did mention those high production values, right? There's all the usual creature-feature tricks, and the director earns a couple good jumps and squeals from the audience.