wadechurton Review of Contracted

Contracted (2013)

Picked up at a party and still there the next morning...And the next...

[6/10 · 21 January 2014]

A movie about a woman who has an ill-considered one-night-stand with a stranger at a party, and of course she gets the STD from hell... (Mild spoilers ahead) It was pretty far-fetched; what should have taken weeks only took days, and the nature of disease itself was just a tiny bit over-the-top (er, maggots? Re-cut and lose the maggots, seriously). At times 'Contracted' comes across as just another rather clumsily- wielded 'cautionary tale', along the lines of 'Reefer Madness' (1936) or the lesser-known 'Sex Madness' (1938). 'Contracted' was reasonably well-acted, well-directed and so on, but we could really have used several weeks of 'reveal', which would have been far creepier than 'wham-bam-another day, another horrible symptom for you to go 'ooh-yuck' at'. Without a slow, protracted reveal, 'Contracted' relies upon a rapid series of 'body horror' incidents for its scares, and indeed there was also a lot of 'The Fly' (1986) about it (right down to blatantly stealing that movie's 'fingernail scene'). Presumably the need to push the story along contributed to the movie's slightly uneven quality but in the final analysis 'Contracted' really isn't that bad, and the 'showdown on the freeway' ending was quite a good one.