Carriers

Written and Directed by: Alex Pastor, David Pastor

What if, in the future, a disease wiped out most of the population? What would you to survive? What if Hollywood produced a low-budget horror movie with that exact premise?

This movie takes place after a biological apocalypse, where we meet up with the Green brothers Danny (Pucci) and Brian (Pine), who have developed rules to help themselves and their girlfriends survive on the road to an elusive beach paradise.. The rules are constantly bent and broken, though, as they encounter other survivors, such as Frank (Meloni) and his infected daughter (Shipka). The pressure to survive weighs heavily on Brian, who slowly begins to lose his sanity and his humanity.

It's regrettable that the film took such an open-ended (though recently overused) premise and failed to take it anywhere. This movie didn't do anything that hadn't already been done by other films to more effect. The filmmakers' message was hard to pull out, and even then it was rather vague.

One scene in the movie stands out as being a cut above the rest of the movie: the scene at the "emergency hospital" set up at the abandoned high school with the doctor. That single scene managed to be unsettling, disturbing, and filled with tension without the need for graphic gore. The character's interaction with the doctor - and the terrible choice he and the group are forced to make - is fantastic, while there's also great tension with what's going on in the car outside. I can't say enough about how that one scene showed how great the rest of the film could have been.

Overall this movie had too much going on. There were too many settings left unexplored, too many characters left undeveloped, and too many stories that were left untold.

I simply can't recommend this movie. If you do watch it, simply watch it through the scene with the doctor at the high school (you'll know the part), because it's all downhill after that. (And, in my own defense, the only reason I watched the entire movie was because I was over halfway through by the time I realized how bad it was.)