Writer and Director Eric England has graced us with a brilliantly clandestine and purulent tale of stupid kids, STD’s and the origin of the Zombie virus. While Zach Snyder’s take on Dawn of the Dead built sweaty anticipation when government officials simply told reporters that they knew fuck-all about the virus, Contracted takes that unknown bullshit by the horns and sticks it in your privates. The script heavily outweighs the rookie leading woman, Najarra Townsend, but that doesn’t mean that the film, shot and completed over a one-month span, isn’t without its moments.
Townsend’s character, Samantha is a girl we all know. Basically, she is that great friend, like Angelina Jolie was when she was 18, that we can bang eventually. Be nice to her and, at some point, it’ll happen. This claptrap’s drag sucks in drooling geeks and proper friends alike, and the blow dial has risen to ten in accordance with Samantha’s brand as a lesbian. Is she? There’s not a lot of clout to her overall quality when she gets tanked at a party, bangs a random male in the backseat of her car, goes home to mom hung-over at noon and, finally, discovers that her body’s orifices refuse to stop purging.
The script’s lofty goals can be seen, and the build to how Zombies arise in America is, as intended by the script, completely fractured. Overall, Contracted remains more thought-provoking in its portrayal of confused University kids sacrificing, literally, everything to be with their one and only, whatever that means. When Samantha’s lower-lip crusts over and one of her big brown eyes turn gray, the mature adult in us all screams at her sophomoric, anarchic idiocy. At the same time, viewers will gasp because all of us could have been her on multiple occasions. Thus, we get the opposite of The Walking Dead. We watch the virus develop instead of being dumped in the aftermath. Either way, it’s a ride worth taking in all its low-budget but beautiful sins-of-the-daughter glory. When a sex scene climaxes with one of the participants exclaiming that Samantha feels tingley, the word that can best describe the feeling is possessed. Contracted is not perfect, but it reverberates.
