Inclubabu Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

GetPapa Far from Perfect, Far from Terrible

Kidskycom It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

TerminalMan ...but that by no means makes it good or even mediocre. This doesn't rise to "complete crap" status. And that's the fascinating part: it's such a non-movie that you keep watching and waiting for something to happen so the movie can get started. But it never does. It actively avoids everything...period. I can't stress enough that isn't an exaggeration, this lack-of-a-movie avoids it's own characters and plot, even just abandoning them completely by the side of the road and goes for a long, slow drive through the countryside. Yes, that literally happens, it's actually a pretty succinct summary of the entire 70 or minute runtime. The most interesting thing about the whole thing comes from the fact that it was made at all: who thought this was a good enough idea to make a movie? Who heard the pitch and invested real, actual money to make it happen? How can an absolute absence of story and characters and events be anything but boring? Was this just another attempt to scam the foreign video market with a fake movie made for $20 and a tank of gas? If nothing else, "Invasion" raises a lot of questions. "Can't there be an IMDb rating BELOW 1?", for example.

cnlmanders I made the mistake of giving my good friend Mr. Chark the remote control at 1 AM last night, and per usual he immediately shot for the OnDemand Menu, where he then proceeded to navigate to the FearNet page. For those of you not in the know, FearNet is a free movie channel devoted to delivering only the highest quality and most spooktastic films created. The night prior I had tossed the remote to him and we ended up on 'Boogeyman,' a 2005 spookfest starring 7th Heaven's Barry Watson. I didn't make it to the end of that one, but I'll take Mr. Chark's word for it and believe that it was not only spooky, but good.Mr. Chark's process for choosing FearNet films is based on two parameters: the year created and the first sentence of the movie description. If the film has been created prior to 1980, or the description does not spook Mr. Chark out by the end of the first sentence ('A meteor/spaceship crashes...' 'A spaceship crashes...' 'A house/young girl is terrorized...' 'A monster/plague/horde of bats is unleashed...' etc) he will be inclined to select another.In the case of 'Invasion'--or 'Infection' if you've managed to find this page, for which I commend you on your efforts--the 2005 copyright date was really all Mr. Chark needed to convince us and himself that this film would contain believable special effects and an all-around spookiness that only comes with contemporary horror films.We were initially dissatisfied with the opening shots of the film, which consisted of 2-3 minutes of text fading in and out, but afterward we realized that the editing software used for the film was probably incapable of scrolling text (an assessment later reinforced by a 15 minute closing credit sequence that also did not incorporate a scroll). Easily forgivable. However, the second shot of the film was slightly less forgivable, in that it may or may not have been shot with a Gameboy Camera.The third shot was probably the biggest mistake of the entire film, as it was not only bad, but it also comprised the remainder of the ~70 minutes of footage. Mr. Chark maintained that it would be a good spookfest, though, so we continued to watch.We believed him for the first 15 minutes of said shot, which consisted of a police-cruiser-outfitted-with-an-HD camera driving a stretch of forest road. There were meteors falling sporadically, indicated by the dashboard camera inverting colors for a split-second.The use of suspenseful music was questionable, as one would believe that a self-described 'true' POV film wouldn't need music unless it was actually diagetic in nature (a la Cloverfield, Blair Witch, mode, etc). Maybe the two characters were just blasting FearNet on SiriusXM.There's a lot that makes sense in this movie. It's probably what would be a fairly realistic account of what driving back and forth across the same patch of forest for an hour would be like: long periods of silence, periodic mumbling that does nothing to advance the character or plot.The 'Invasion' itself is also pretty realistic. Imagine if four people drove into the woods, and three of those four were then infected through their ear canal by an alien slug (it is now evident that the the writer and director films are young enough to have read Animorphs). Once infected, the alien's tactic for spreading itself is to stagger slowly, as if with palsy, and aggressively hug its next victim.All that being said, the fourth uninfected human really just has to not be within arms' reach of any of the three infected people in the woods and she'll survive, which she can easily accomplish my walking briskly away from them at any point. She manages to do this for the majority of the film, which consequently means that the viewer will watch the same night-vision shot of an unmoving forest road for up to twenty minutes at a time.Every so often we get auditory glimpses of what's going on outside the forest in the nearby town. The infection spreads there, lots of gunfire. This is relayed via radio transmission.The best analogy we could come up for this was if 'Cloverfield' had been shot in Westchester from the point of view of a PlayStation Move camera, in which the subject is receiving text messages from a friend from NYC.The scares were not good. I almost would have preferred things jumping out of the woods to startle me (I am a major wuss, though, so I'm glad they didn't), but it was clear that the actors had neither the physical prowess nor the coordination to work that into the script. At one point they make a big emphasis of what I took to be a bird taking a dump on the car's windshield. Is that spooky? Sort It's a bad movie. Real bad. Bad to do. Not even that spooky. I was upset. We were all a little upset. I wish we had watched Super Mario Brothers instead. That's free OnDemand, too.I feel like on a normal review scale, 'Invasion' shouldn't register. However, I review on the Mr. Chark's Spook Scale, which puts this film at a lofty 2. While it is a miserable, half-aborted idea for a movie, it can't be the worst thing on FearNet by any means. Until he finds that movie, Mr. Chark will search on.

Richard Hawes Director Albert Pyun does not inspire confidence. His name evokes groans and memories of cheap and often pretentious genre films. But when I heard that his latest project was a single uninterrupted shot I was as intrigued as anyone to see the results. The fact that Infection (retitled Invasion when it DVD) was getting praise from critics only served to heighten my interest. The film's novelty is that it is a science fiction film told from the fixed view of a high definition camera mounted on a police car. With a cast of mostly unknowns and an aura of mystery, Infection inspired a similar level of intrigue as the much higher profile Cloverfield (2008). If only the results were as exciting. Whether the consequence of budgetary limitations or a misguided artistic aspiration, Infection is a huge disappointment. Shoddy-looking news footage and title cards set the scene as the film begins with a Police officer driving down the dirt roads of a national park. He meets a local resident acting very strangely. Once again something alien has come to small town USA, but while the soundtrack provides plot information the visual element is an endless steam of footage of bland dirt roads. Pyun is both a prolific hack and a talentless artist and has been consistently disappointing viewers for nearly 30 years. One can theorise that this event-free narrative experiment and its largely meaningless visuals are intended to isolate viewers. To hypnotise or unsettle an audience used to seeing everything. If that was the artistic intent that's fair enough but it simply doesn't work. While I respect that using a single traveling camera to encounter various characters is a complex undertaking I can't help but feel that he could have done more. Set within an urban location and with a larger cast this could have been, like Cloverfield, an extraordinary film. As it is it's just a bore. The fact that over-the-top sound design, a smattering of dubious visual effects and an admittedly interesting score seek to shatter the faux-realism of the found footage merely adds to the overwhelming sense of disappointment.

atmd2005 This film screened at the Velvet Jones Night Club in Santa Barbara in 2005 and I still can't forget it. I have never experienced anything like this before. I don't know how Pyun pulled off such a personally harrowing experience. I felt like it was happening to me. I can only figure it must be the one-shot aspect that grabs hold, but that doesn't really capture what happens. I felt excruciating tension during this film and stayed locked into my seat after the end. You'd think I'd be talking about the story, what happened and how good the acting was, but it wasn't like a movie with actors. It was like being completely immersed within real life-threatening events. I've read some people say it's like Blair Witch, but that wasn't as all consuming and personal as "Infection". This felt like an experience I was having, not a movie and not even an event I was watching. "Infection" is a 'must see' for every movie lover and every gamer - it's a cross between the two...only better.