Main cast: Matt Mercer (Riley), Marianna Palka (Detective Crystal Young), Morgan Peter Brown (BJ), Anna Lore (Harper), Laurel Vail (Brenda), Peter Cilella (James), and John Ennis (Special Agent Dalton)
Director: Josh Forbes
Don’t be fooled by the rather sexy and twisted movie poster – the only way Contracted: Phase II is even considered sexy is if one has a fetish for bloody vomits and other bodily liquid expulsions. Not that I am judging you if you like this kind of thing, of course. We are all about acceptance and love here.
Anyway, this one takes off from where Contracted ends, and it’s Riley’s turn to do the zombie dance. If you have watched the previous movie, that idiot had sex with Samantha despite the fact that she was just one ruptured pustule away from becoming a zombie extra on Resident Evil. Of course, when you have a mysterious disease, you stay in the same house as your beloved grandmother, your sister, and her husband, while dripping and puking blood everywhere. It’s all totally safe, naturally! And then Riley discovers that BJ the original zombie germ spreader is around, and goes to seek him out, wielding a gun and cutting out maggots from his body in the process.
Matt Mercer’s naked torso is nice to look at, if one overlooks the face scars, pustules, and such, and he takes off his shirt often here. That’s small consolation, though, to watching this dreary and tedious movie. Unlike the previous movie, which was basically women being all obnoxious and death-worthy, here Riley gets to play the stereotypical “I’m a guy so I play with my gun!” thing. The script doesn’t answer anything conclusively, it’s more interested in throwing body horror scenes than anything else. Trouble is, I’ve seen far better body horror movies in the past. Compared to, say, David Cronenberg’s movies in the 1970’s and 1980’s, this one is a low-rented imitation version, and the saddest thing is that those movies came out more than 20 years ago.
Still, the characters here aren’t as annoying as the previous movie, so in some ways, it’s better than the previous movie. But it lacks a build-up or mounting anticipation, so it’s worse in other ways too. At any rate, both movies blow, so I guess they’re both about the same in the waste of time factor.
