Infection (2005) poster

Infection (2005)

Rating:

aka Invasion


USA. 2005.

Crew

Director – Albert Pyun, Screenplay – Cynthia Curnan, Producers – Robert Ladesich & Norbert Weisser, Photography – James Carl Hagopian, Music – Tony Riparetti, Visual Effects – Bayouth Productions, Claws and Effect, LLC & The Post Office Editorial (Supervisor – Chris Burkhalter). Production Company – Filmwerks/Robert Ladesich Films Inc.

Cast

Virginia Dare (Cheryl Cooper), Don Opper (Voice of Deputy Ben), Scott Paulin (Officer Brick Bardo), Morgan Weisser (Tommy Boswell), Alan Abelew (Jenkins), Tony Stewart (Man With Disabled Truck), Norbert Weisser (Dr Franks/Deputy Ben on Camera), Laurie O’Brien (Reporter)


Plot

Dashcam footage from a police car of an incident in Lawton California in May 2006. Police officer Brick Bardo drove into a park to investigate reports of lights in the sky. After getting out to talk to a man whose truck had broken down, he was attacked by the man and transformed. Driving on, the possessed Bardo came to a couple parked on a side road and went to attack them. After the guy became infected, the girl Cheryl Cooper fled in the police car. As she tried to explain what happened to another deputy over the radio, Cheryl encountered other people that have been taken over everywhere she drove.


Albert Pyun is a director who has a unique cult. Pyun emerged in the 1980s with a series of low-budget films and by the 1990s had begun to specialise in kickboxing cyborg films with the likes of Cyborg (1989), Knights (1993), Nemesis (1993) and sequels, Heatseeker (1994) and Omega Doom (1996). Pyun’s films of the 2000s and beyond have become increasingly stranger with stretched budgets and resources due to the fact that he prefers to shoot the independently. Infection was also the first occasion where Pyun’s longtime girlfriend, later wife Cynthia Curnan took a screenwriter credit. (See below for Albert Pyun’s other genre films).

Infection is one of the oddest films in Pyun’s oeuvre – an Alien Invasion, or perhaps more so Body Snatchers film, that has been shot entirely in terms of dashcam footage from a camera mounted in a police car. This was clearly an attempt to jump aboard the Found Footage fad of the early 2000s created by the massive hit of The Blair Witch Project (1999). The same idea was later used by Rob Savage in the more high-profile Dashcam (2021).

Pyun also appears to have shot Infection as a Long Take film. The Long Take refers to a film that has been shot in a single unbroken or unedited take. The first of these was Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) and has also included the likes of Russian Ark (2002), Cut (2010), Silent House (2011), Fish & Cat (2013), Victoria (2015), King Dave (2016), Rendez-Vous (2019), Corona (2020) and others, before the genre was hilariously parodied by the Japanese One Cut of the Dead (2017). Although it is hard to tell if Infection is a full single take film. Much of it involves lengthy single shots as the police car travels from location to location but there are times when the car has stopped and nothing is happening on screen where you cannot be certain if Pyun done so so as to insert an unobtrusive cut.

Dashcam footage of alien body snatchers in Infection (2005)
Dashcam footage of alien body snatchers

Out of this, Pyun certainly gets some undeniable effect – like where the police officer (Scott Paulin) goes to aid a broken down truck driver (Tony Stewart) and is attacked and returns to the car changed, whereupon his voice starts slipping between regular and a deep growling one as he sets off, promising with evident glee to give a scare to the couple parked back down the road.

On the other hand, there is not much more to the film than a lot of driving around, punctuated by occasional action that occurs in front of the car. Crucially there is no plot to anything that is going on – just random scenes of people being attacked. While the agency behind this is suggested as being a UFO, nothing is clarified any more than that.

Pyun and Cynthia Curnan later made a sequel The Interrogation of Cheryl Cooper (2014), another Long Take film shot as a police interview where the role of the surviving girl her was played by Tommie Vegas. In both films, we also get a character named Brick Bardo, a name that reappears through Pyun’s films, most notedly Tim Thomerson in Dollman (1990). For some reason, Bardo was originally a character in Ray Dennis Steckler’s The Thrill Killers (1964).

Albert Pyun’s other films are:– The Sword and the Sorceror (1982), Radioactive Dreams (1986), Vicious Lips/Pleasure Planet (1987), Alien from L.A. (1988), the uncredited Journey to the Center of the Earth (1988), Cyborg (1989), Deceit (1989), Captain America (1990), Dollman (1990), Brain Smasher: A Love Story (1993), Knights (1993), Nemesis (1993), Arcade (1994), Hong Kong 1997 (1994), Heatseeker (1995), Nemesis 2: Nebula (1995), Nemesis 3: Timelapse (1995), Adrenalin: Fear the Rush (1996), Nemesis 4: Death Angel (1996), Omega Doom (1996), Postmortem (1998), Ticker (2001), Cool Air (2006), Bulletface (2007), Left for Dead (2007), Tales of an Ancient Empire (2010), The Interrogation of Cheryl Cooper (2014) and Interstellar Civil War (2017).


Trailer here


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