Main cast: Najarra Townsend (Samantha Williams), Caroline Williams (Nancy Williams), Alice Macdonald (Alice Patrick), Katie Stegeman (Nikki), Matt Mercer (Riley McCormick), Charley Koontz (Zain), and Simon Barrett (Brent “BJ” Jaffe)
Director: Eric England
For a movie that tries to link sexual encounters to some kind of decomposing condition that turns one into a zombie, Contracted is surprisingly coy about its sexual elements. In fact, the implications can be quite unfortunate, as our female protagonist Samantha Williams contracted this mysterious disease after being drugged and raped by a corpse-shagging fellow called BJ. She is a lesbian who is trying to get in touch with her ex Nikki, so I guess the message here is that… don’t accept drinks from ugly balding guys? All penis-in-vagina sex is rape and dangerous? At any rate, this is like a zombie movie made for those deranged people on Tumblr.
I suspect that the underlying message or theme of this movie – whatever it is – may be more effective if Samantha had been a willing participant in that sexual encounter that would eventually turn her into a zombie. At least then schools can use this movie to warn their students to keep those legs clamped shut until they are married, I guess.
Anyway, this movie is slow and draggy, not that this is necessarily a bad thing. But it becomes quite painful to watch when the script – also by Eric England – ends up portraying the main female characters as a bunch of obnoxious people. Samantha is whiny and childish, and her refusal to seek medical attention (not that it would have helped, anyway) makes her look even more pathetic, as her refusal is due to the fact that she doesn’t want the man-hating stereotype of a lesbian, Nikki, to hate her for sleeping with a man. Indeed, the script seems to be written by some guy whose only exposure to women is through lesbian pornography or slasher movies, as even the mother character is obnoxious as can be. Caroline Williams, as usual, plays her role as if she would be paid extra if she shouts out every line, and I cringe each time Nancy is in the scene.
Oh, and the few guys in this movie are not exactly winners either. One’s a necrophiliac rapist with a peen full of zombie germs, one pushes rape drug, and the only sane person in the entire movie is still insane enough to have sex with a woman who looks a smelly, dirty corpse with a milky eye.
Contracted is a movie in which the moral of the day is that stupid people shouldn’t be allowed to have sex and risk creating spawns as dumb as they are, and it is definitely a good thing that these dumb people would all get to die of a slow and painful wasting disease.
