HEy folks, Harry here with long termer AICNer - MiraJeff and his look at this latest experiment in Japanese Horror called INFECTION - read and see if you should catch it or walk way around this INFECTION...

What’s up AICN? It’s MiraJeff again, here with a look at “Infection,” a Japanese horror movie playing as part of the Midnight section at the Tribeca Film Festival. As everyone with a multi-region DVD player can tell you, Asian horror is all the rage these days. How do I know this? Because the uber-geek clerk stationed at my local Otukuden outlet said so. So it should surprise no one that the reason “Infection” is scary is because it is set in a hospital and features a cast of characters who can all amputate bodies with girl-in-“Audition”-like precision. If one of them actually went crazy, they could do a hell of a lot of damage with something as small as a scalpel.



“Infection” begins with a radio transmission from an ambulance that has a patient with an unnaturally high temperature and a black rash spreading on his chest. No hospitals respond to the broadcast or offer space to treat him. We’ll call this poor bastard, Patient X. Meanwhile, the staff of the unfortunate hospital has killed a patient and committed malpractice. A nurse gives the guy the wrong injection and before we distinguish chlorate from chloride, he’s basically dead. This doesn’t bode well for the young doctors, as they bring a bad omen upon the hospital and unleash some contagious evil while planning their cover-up, which essentially involves a chemical that liquidates organs and speeds up the decaying process. When the ambulance drivers drop Patient X off at the hospital’s ER entrance, things get even stranger.



Director Masayuki Ochiai piles on the gore and grotesquery, including all the requisite sound effects to make your skin crawl. He treats us to a buffet of incisions, injections, melted flesh, burned hands, and plenty of green gunk coming out of people’s orifices. The secret green ooze and gore is so extreme and unrealistic, it looks like the stuff that rained on people on “You Cant Do That On Television.” Not to mention, our hero, the suave young doctor who wanders down narrow, poorly lit hallways armed with a flashlight and a stethoscope is hard to root for considering he’s a giant vag who’s always worried about doing the right thing for his patients rather than saving his own ass.



The film’s dialogue is trite and cliché’ but I’m guessing dialogue isn’t why most of us pay to watch subtitled Asian horror flicks. Sample line: “It’s too far gone. It’s spreading.” I understand that these doctors are a team of do-gooders, compelled in the name of medicine to do what is right, because if they don’t, no one else will. But the MD’s and nurses aren’t immediately infected which confused me, but I guess for the price of med school they equip you with some meaner white blood cells or something, whatever those things that fight infection are. I didn’t know who started this bizarre disease. I didn’t know why Ochiai kept cutting to swings that moved by themselves. Where were these swings? Is there a playground near the hospital? Sure, it was eerie, but what’s going on in this movie? I needed an interpreter for some of its abstract cuts. Where’s Nicole Kidman, dammit! In the end, “Infection” teaches us that there is no escaping the endless cycle of disease. Death catches up to us all sooner or later.



There’s a score of horror movies at the festival this week and I’m praying “Infection” is the worst of them. It’s a meaningless exercise in gore and karma with a few scares and twisted visuals but nothing worth writing home about. Word on the street is that “Premonition,” another Asian import, is pretty good, but I’m still counting on the festival’s American horror pics, “Long Distance,” and “Reeker,” to amp up the terror at Tribeca. Until next time, stay in good health and out of the hospital. Man those places freak me out.