Rating: B-
Dir: Hui Hong
Star: Pema Jyad, Sunny Jin, Fu Yan Dan, Zina Blahusova
a.k.a. Deadly Parasite
This one seems mostly to be borrowing from The Faculty, though as we will see, the wholesale appropriation doesn’t stop there. At a crisp 73 minutes, it doesn’t have time to hang around, so what it lacks in originality, it certainly makes up for in pace. This begins with the apparent philosophical musings of an octopus: “If we were human, can we stop the endless killing?… Can we survive better? What exactly is the human world like?” We then visit the Huayi University Research Institute, on a small island in the South Pacific, whose statuesque blonde manager, Lisa (Blahusova), sprouts tentacles. Okay, film: you have secured my attention. Now what?
“What” would be the arrival of a group of medical students from Huayi, who are visiting for educational purposes. Right from the start, Zhang Xiang Yang (Jyad) suspects there’s something off, finding a tentacle in the facility courtyard, which proves capable of regenerating overnight. He, along with friends Chen Ling (Jin) and Li Yu Fei (Fu), also notice the strange behaviour of their classmates and… yeah, the faculty. Eventually. Zhang figures out what’s going on, and also that the creatures can be defeated by the use of a dehydrating reagent. However, the hope is, if they find and destroy the central creature, all infected victims will be freed. Why he comes to this conclusion is unclear. Seems like the product of reading too many vampire novels to me.
Things are complicated by the presence of an infected person in their group, as they discover when they try to leave, and find the outbreak is no longer limited to the Research Institute. The reagent offers a way to find out who’s the parasite, in a scene which plays like a convenience store version of the testing sequence from The Thing. So it’s appropriate this version takes place… in a convenience store. Snark aside, there are some moments here which look surprisingly good, with an impressive visual eye. See the shot above, with a parasite carrier casting shadows against the roof of a church. At times I did think, I’ve seen far bigger movies which didn’t have as nice an aesthetic.
Helps that the makers keep things quite restrained on the effects front. There’s a lot of tentacles getting waved around, certainly. Those are about the extent of it, and I think I’d rather see a film do a small number of effects competently – and the ones here are decent – then overstretch themselves in too many directions. Was a little disappointed by the final target being defeated rather too easily, leading to a palpable sense of “Is that it?”, especially when coupled with an ending whose implications are unclear. In general, however, this keeps things entertaining and fun. It is perhaps taking some digs at Chinese notions of conforming, the parasites arguing their cases with lines like, “Being strong is the manifestation of hiding weakness.” I did not see that coming.