Growth (2009)

Talk about a wasted opportunity! I love parasites. Yes, I love and worship the little critters, I admit that. There is nothing more vile and disgusting than a creature that enters your body, grows into it and changes your dna for the only purpose of its own survival. What a perfect plotdevice for a horror movie, eh? Movies like Alien have shown that you can make a great horror movie with the concept and while it would be unfair to compare, you still do. Growth takes an interesting backstory and does... nothing much with it I'm afraid. It starts out well but dribbles away into oblivion leaving the viewer very dissapointed. It does have a pretty good trailer though, which made me buy the movie without even reading any reviews. Sucker.

It starts incredibly well with a sequence detailing parts of an experiment gone wrong on a small inhabited island where a scientist is performing experiments with parasites to create some sort of superhuman. When the intro ends we have learned that the experiment failed horribly and that a young girl was evacuated in a small boat. Ok, flash forward 20 years and the young girl now grown up has received a letter about a property on the island which belongs to her which she should be able to sell at a high price so naturally she goes there along with her boyfriend, her sick stepbrother and a female friend who has the hots for the brother. The locals arent exactly happy that she has arrived though.. maybe they are hiding something? Could it be that the parasites are on the prowl again? How big is the chance that the waekling brother will be infected by the parasite that supposedly turns a normal human into a superhuman? And why is it that the police seems to have their HQ at a highschool?

Yes, it starts out well. A couple of flashbackscenes (that both are in the trailer) are incredibly effective but it seems like the filmmakers didnt know how to handle this potential. The brother gets infected and runs around being alternately evil and not so evil, only to suit the purpose of the somewhat confused plot. The concept and execution of the parasites are well handled with the slithering little things poking out of eyeballs and holes in the infected bodies, but when the plot meanders around never reaching a satisfactory climax, it's potential is wasted. The script somehow feels as if it was only half finished when they started shooting it and made up stuff along the way and the climax is somewhat anticlimactic since there is never any real threat to the community. There are supposed to be a fairly decent population on the island but you never see any of them except in a scene or two and I can promise you that there is no horrorcontent in those moments. The actors do a decent enough job with the material they have and there is absolutely nothing wrong with Gabriel Cowans directing capabilities, only his scriptwriting. The movie feels like yet another one of those generic Syfymovies, although somewhat better shot and with better special effects, but with a worse script than usual. It's not the worst movie out there, it has some good bits but also a shitload of plotholes and stupid behaviour (My favorite being a bit spoilerish so skip the next sentence if you dont want to find out - the heroines boyfriend gets killed in a random scene without any particular impact but she never even asks about him or seem to miss him at all. Eh?).

A interesting concept but deeply flawed. Too bad, the parasites themselves were cool.