Infection (2004)

Wonderful Movie

Pretty Good

Good start, but then it gets ruined

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Another class effort from Japanese. This slice of J-horror doesn't offer an easy, linear viewing experience; it leaves a lot of questions unanswered, and the viewer is required to make his or her mind up about a lot of what is happening. The obtuse, abstract nature of the production might be off-putting to viewers who want spoon-feeding, but I really liked it.And it's an incredibly eerie production set in one of the most run-down and depressing locations ever: a dark and dingy hospital, full of dirt and tired medical staff who wish they were somewhere else. The plotting begins when an unspecified patient suffering from some kind of infection is brought in, stretching the already stressed staff to breaking point.There are some quite wonderful set-pieces, my favourite being the extended sequence and aftermath of the team trying to resuscitate a burns victim; haunting stuff indeed. There are the requisite jump scenes and gore spread out here and there, but it's the incredibly foreboding atmosphere which I liked the best. The director makes great use of his colour palette, particularly the contrast between green and red, and the performances are the ultra-professional ones you'd expect from Japan. INFECTION might be just too unwieldy a film for me to describe it as a favourite, but it's certainly a remarkable one all the same.

When a severe burns patient is accidentally given the wrong treatment, resulting in his death, the doctor and nurses present agree to cover up their dreadful mistake. Meanwhile, another severely ill patient is abandoned in ER by paramedics, resulting in an outbreak of a deadly infection at the hospital that causes momentary madness in its victims and the liquefaction of their internal organs.Home to misery, pain and death, hospitals are inherently suited to horror, especially at night when their creepy corridors and sterile rooms full of wickedly sharp surgical instruments become all the more atmospheric and ominous. Infection's creepy locale, a grimy, rundown hospital shrouded in shadows, is certainly very effective, the uneasy mood helping to detract somewhat from the fact that very little in this film makes much sense.As the staff struggle to contain the infection, one by one contracting the disease and turning into puddles of green goop, matters get more and more incomprehensible. By the end of the film, I hadn't got a clue what was going on, but found myself reasonably entertained for the duration by the unsettling tone and sheer weirdness of proceedings, which includes lots of green/red symbolism, a nurse sterilising her hands in boiling water, ghosts that can only be seen in mirrors, and several inexplicable shots of park swings that move by themselves.

After reading many of the reviews I find myself wondering what people do when they watch movies. This movie along with most Asian horror films was superb. In America we are redoing horror movies instead of trying to invent new ones, i.e. Nightmare on Elm ST. come on that is a dead horse. Anyway Infection---Great film I recommend that you watch this, the Setting a rundown hospital, the characters-flawed overworked staff, the atmosphere truly eerie. A mysterious infection begins to spread throughout the hospital, liquefying the victims. Like many Asian horror films the truth behind everything is cloudy, the only true flaw that I can attribute to this film is that there were not nearly enough patients to call the staff overworked. Still watch this film,

J-Horror is quite an odd beast to be reckoned with. This movie was at least entertaining to watch, unlike the last J film I saw - the barely coherent pile of puke known as Rinne - with some nicely done characters that actually made you feel a little bit sorry for them before they died, and a plot that most likely wasn't achieved by snorting large amounts of imported cocaine, along with some surprisingly good suspense sprinkled lightly over the whole thing. There are some damn good scares here, too, such as the possessions of the young nurses (those Japanese can be pretty twisted). This is actually pretty entertaining, despite the fact that the ending makes less sense than an elephant walking down Main Street with a shimmering pink ribbon attached to its testicles.Once again though, the potential this movie had was not fully realized. I suppose this was made on a rather limited budget, because the special effects and gore are really, really fake looking. Green ooze does not a (good) horror film make. And the way the plot was executed was just slightly lacking somehow, could've been much more suspenseful and dark I suppose. And once again, this is just too weird sometimes, without any real reason to be. This should've just been a typical insanity/plague horror movie, but the Japanese, in traditional Japanese style, have blurred the lines and created quite a dreary, hazy atmosphere that hovers over Infection like a cloud of gnats. These elements aren't even brought into full as on Rinne, making one wonder why they were even included in the first place. Leave that to Donnie Darko and company.Hey, if you like horror movies with crazy old women and boiling green slime, then this is right up your alley! Recommended.