Release Date: May 8, 2015 (Limited and VOD)
Director: Shane Abbess
MPAA Rating: R
Run Time: 110 min.
Shane Abbess’ sci-fi/horror film Infini starts off well enough, evoking shades of Aliens, Event Horizon, The Thing and even Danny Boyle’s Sunshine. The concept of a gang of roughneck space marines heading into the abyss and battling some unknown evil is never one that will get old and probably one we’ll see for years to come.
Rather than squaring off against pissed-off xenomorphs, Abbess goes the Carpenter route and opts for a more parasitic foe, one that infects its hosts, effectively making them lose their shit and turn evil. Infini’s preamble informs us that, due to a financial collapse in the future, many people take dangerous but high-paying jobs that involve exploring the farthest reaches of space, mining resources or engaging in military operations. The method of travel for these workers is something called slip-streaming, which basically allows them to teleport to their destinations.
Whit Carmichael, played by Daniel MacPherson, is a new recruit, who, after a mission gone afoul, ends up alone on a mining facility after a biological outbreak took the lives of everyone there. A crew of soldiers is sent to the base to rescue Carmichael and destroy a volatile payload that one of the mine’s infected workers intended to send toward Earth. After reaching the base, the team finds Carmichael, who tells them there’s some sort of parasite that infects people through their blood and turns them into killers. And guess what? The team starts getting infected.
If this story sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because director Abbess seems to have cherry-picked bits and pieces from other popular sci-fi movies of this ilk and fashioned his own story out of them, which isn’t inherently a bad thing. The film’s first and third acts worked fairly well, but the middle drags and tries to be more exciting than it really is. It’s bogged down with overly long conversations that add little to the story, expecting us to care what these people have to say even though we have no idea who any of them are, aside from Carmichael, who we still barely know.
Aesthetically, the film works but does little to deviate from the well of inspiration from which it is borrowing its ideas. Dark, labrynthian corridors full of viscera, tubes and random detritus litter the facility and are juxtaposed against brightly lit lab rooms containing gross-looking specimen jars housing the alien parasite. It’s nothing we haven’t seen done better before, but it still looks good, especially given the budget constraints of this film.
This is a low-budget production, but Abbess seems to have a knack for doing a lot with a little, and the production value on this project was impressive to say the least. Infini is a serviceable sci-fi horror film that looks good but suffers from some serious pacing issues that prevent it from being the tight, psychological thriller that it could have been.
