Isolation

I’m going to, if not necessarily lie, then at least randomly guess that this movie started off really slowly, if only because my mom and sister were talking so much for the first fifteen minutes or so of the film that I was completely unable to follow it, and so I am now quietly hoping that I didn’t really miss anything important. Regardless, despite such a clearly dull opening, once this film actually got going it wound up being pretty effective, in an “I don’t really know who these characters are, but we shall overcome all the same due to their being menaced by a really creepy monster created by science gone awry” type of way.

The plot, from what I eventually gathered, involves a scientist and his crew performing experiments on cows and their fetuses on an isolated farm out in Ireland (I’m guessing this location due to their accents and the director’s last name being O’Brien. Never let it be said that I am above casually stereotyping things). Something Goes Wrong, and one cow’s babies all turn out to be deformed monsters with insatiable appetites for intestinal tracts, and which can infest other animals either by burrowing inside of them, or merely by biting them. All but one of the monsters is killed right at birth, which I’m going to guess is because that one is so damned dangerous by itself to this crew of misfit toys that if his brothers and sisters were around too there wouldn’t even be the slightest chance of survival for the human race. It would be Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things all over again.

It becomes a very effective, though somewhat cliché, monster movie at this point, with some nice directing and a good dose of bad taste permeating the scenario, with blood coating walls so much one might almost think Stuart Gordon had directed it. There’s also one particularly gross scene in which they try to flush the monster out from its apparent hiding place in a goddamn lake of liquid cow feces by having one of the less important characters driving a vehicle through it that doesn’t quite go up high enough to keep him from having the liquid shit sloshing around his feet while he drives. If I made mention of how this scene culminates with the poo clogging up the engine, requiring him to wade back to the others, only to find something even nastier in the pool with him, would it really be much of a surprise to you?

If there’s one problem I had to pinpoint with the movie (you know, beyond the bafflingly dull opening), it’s that it becomes consistently less fun the larger the monster gets. It devolves a bit from being a really creepy movie about a deadly creature that’s so small it could really be hiding just about anywhere into a movie about a really big creature that just charges straight at everyone, and it’s just not as much fun then. Still, it’s a good sight better than most horror movies that actually show up in theaters these days, so I’d suggest you all go give it a rental, at the very least.