A whiny young woman talks to the wrong person at a party and finds herself roofied and having sex with him in his car. However, rather than just wake up with a terrible hangover, she finds out she’s contracted (hence the title) a new form of STD: one that slows her bodily functions, numbs her nerve endings and has blood spewing from various orifices by the pint. In effect, she’s becoming a living corpse.
Yes, folks, what we have here is a new take on the zombie formula. Although the idea is good, and the underlying parable could have lent itself to an interesting moral discussion about unprotected sex (as well as the social satire of having a character turn into a zombie while her family and friends think her change in behavior is the result of being on drugs), the film instead descends straight into unintentional comedy.
Written and directed by Chilling Visions: 5 Senses of Fear contributor Eric England, Contracted is one of those horror movies in which everyone acts ridiculously stupid; therefore, you’re too busy laughing at the characters rather than fearing for their safety. While a sane and normal person would head to the ER if she peed a quart of blood, Samantha (Najarra Townsend, Me and You and Everyone We Know) is more concerned with attempting to reconcile with her ex (Katie Stegeman, Madison County). When Samantha does seek medical help, she unfortunately finds the world’s dumbest doctor (Ruben Pla, Insidious) who seems to think that her patches of necrotic skin, slow heart rate and blood leakage from her eyes and vagina are symptoms of a bad “head cold.”
To be fair, Townsend does an admirable job portraying an annoying dishrag of a woman whom others, except her ex, all inexplicably want to have sex with — even when her skin begins to rot off her face and one of her eyes turns milky-white. It’s too bad the material she’s forced to work with isn’t up to par. And just when things start to get going and we think there’s going to be a horrifically good payoff … the film ends.
Contracted is one of those movies that makes a great MST3K evening. Invite some friends, turn down the sound and riff away. Believe me, the dialogue you and your pals invent could only improve this mess. —Slade Grayson
Jason Trost — 
Operating on a budget of what looks like a hundred dollars and change, Trost gives it an admirable go, but the movie becomes bogged down in too many plot holes (how did Rickshaw manage to capture them in the first place?), too many unanswered questions (their superpowers are never explained), too many eye-rolling scenes (the characters have a knack for heart-to-heart conversations while their time is clearly running out) and too many seams showing (in both their costumes and the “special effects,” as in explosions being shown by an off-camera stagehand tossing bits of wood and handfuls of dirt into frame).
Disclaimer: I don’t usually watch cop movies. I find them to be of one extreme or the other. Either the cops are portrayed as noble and by-the-book, even if it means the perpetrators are allowed to go free (which veers so far from reality that you may as well affix the “fantasy” label), or portrayed as so corrupt that the film descends into ridiculousness, like 