Zach Henderson and Randy Foster are two young men who decide to film life in and around their small town, trying to get a piece of that YouTube fame (or whatever generic video uploading site is standing in for it). Nothing happens in their town, or so they think. Some new bugs have arrived, bugs that bite people. And once someone is bitten, it’s only a matter of time until they change. With everyone radically changing around them, Zach and Randy end up teaming up with Kayla, desperately trying to avoid assimilation while they figure out the best way to fight back against what looks very much like an invasion of creatures that snatch/swap bodies. Because, yes, this is a teen-friendly reworking of Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers.
Director John Murlowski is an odd figure. His filmography covers a wide range of movies, from one of the many Amityville series entries to the infamous Santa With Muscles, and he has helmed a couple of movies that have pleasantly surprised me (including that Amityville movie). This premise seems like an easy one to get right, and Murlowski does a good job with the material, working from a script that he co-wrote with Steven Palmer Peterson. It’s far from perfect, and may be the least of the films based on this material, but it’s tense and entertaining throughout.
The life cycle of the invader is pieced together well, with characters figuring things out as they face increasingly immediate threats, and the way the town is overtaken is impressively quick and plausible. People are changed, that’s obvious, but the aim is to get the new creations outnumbering the original humans as quickly as possible, and a lot of the changes happening so brazenly make things seem more ridiculous when our leads try to convince others of odd happenings.
Joel Courtney and Calum Worth do well in their roles, playing Zach and Randy, and they come across as likeable enough throughout, even when doing the whole “let’s film everything around us and comment on it” spiel that could have easily been built up to turn this into a painful found footage take on the material, and I am very glad that route wasn’t taken. Andi Matichak is equally good in the role of Kayla, a character also given a little brother to try and protect, just to up the stakes, and all three leads are served well by the script. Some of the supporting players have to overdo the change from normal to blank slate, but Cam Gigandet stands out as a local Sheriff who may or may not end up being a dangerous enemy.
Although I didn’t love this, I liked it well enough. And I like it more when I think of the choices made for what NOT to do. No doing the whole found footage thing is a big plus. Not cramming the film with songs to help sell any accompanying soundtrack album. Having the special effects used pretty sparingly, and therefore making them more effective. There are other films in which these things - format, FX work, banging tunes - can, and have, been used to great effect, but this feels like everything was done to make the film teen-friendly without moving too far away from the simplistic brilliance of the central concept. It features youths at the heart of it all, but never dumbs things down or tries to be “too cool for school”. And the third act adds one or two pleasant surprises.
6/10
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