Review: Isolation

When I was younger, I didn’t watch many horror movies. I was a skittish kid, easily frightened and I stayed away from them. Later, I felt they were an inferior genre, but as my exposure to them increased, I realized that I liked a good tension-builder. I was looking for such a fix last week when I opened up the Netflix Instant Watch app on my phone to pick out a movie for the night. I thumbed through the ‘Horror’ offerings, passing up some interesting-looking Asian films and some horrible-looking American slashers. I settled on a quiet little film called Isolation, which featured a picture of a lonely farmhouse centered above a close-up of frightened eyes, set in gray, blood-streaked flesh. Ok, I thought, let’s try this out.

The film is set on an Irish dairy farm. The farmer, Dan, is being compensated by a genetics company to allow them to test their new bovine growth hormones on his herd. A complication with one of the pregnant cows soon turns mysterious and deadly. Before I ‘spoil’ this movie, I’ll give a quick comparison to clue you in on where we’re going here. I’ve described the film to friends as Alien on a dairy farm, with a sprinkling of Critters (at least what I remember seeing between my fingers when I was younger) and as many tired, overused creature-horror moments as they could shove in. Here endeth the non-spoiler portion of the review:

The pace of the movie is very slow and deliberate at first, something I like in my thrillers. Writer/director Dan O'Brien eases you into the movie with beautifully eerie cinematography and unexpected perspectives. You feel you’re going to enjoy a nice little indie film about isolation on a dairy farm. Very shortly, the bovine pregnancy has complications. As the vet, Orla is sticking her hand up the cow’s nether-regions to ‘feel around’ for the fetus, she cries in pain and wrenches her hand from the cow’s steaming anus. She rips off her arm-length surgical glove to reveal…what’s this? A laceration? From a cow fetus?

A side story of a young couple (Jamie and Mary) in a caravan on the road is revealed. They’re running from something. Hmmm… intrigue. Orla leaves for the night, leaving Dan to tend the herd on his own. He goes to check on Bessie in the middle of the night to find that she’s bleeding and the calf is ready to come out. He runs out to the caravan to get Jamie to assist in shoving a pully system up the cow’s arse to help ‘push’ (haha) the birthing process along. “This is a big one” Dan says as he grunts and clicks back the lever one more notch. At one point, Bessie gets agitated (would you blame her?) and begins to buck and spin. With the contraption attached to her rear, it looks as though she’s giving birth to a child’s swingset. And not liking it.

The baby is big and seems rather docile, even for a cow. He (or she) lies there, rasping out each laborious breath, staring straight ahead in a look of pain and desolation only a cow can achieve. Dan discovers that instead of the normal mouthful of grass munching molars, the baby has a gnarly set of haggard fangs arranged like pixie-sticks in her sad maw. Orla doesn’t like the look of it and wants to put the calf and the mother out of their shared post-partum misery. She grabs her rod and piston gun and tries to pull the trigger but chickens out at the last minute, missing the poor calf’s brain and instead spreading a cloud of brain-blood all over her person. The calf cries in pain. Oh, the poor calf. After much ado, it ends up dead and Bessie gets drilled after she strands herself trying to jump over the pen to save her doomed calf. Yes, the movie still had me in its clutches at this point.

Fast-forward to the creature feature: The rub to this particular yarn is that the growth hormone fed to the cows is a little too effective. John, the scheming, Machiavellian scientist explains that the hormones were meant to produce bigger cows that reproduce faster. Instead, they’ve created a set of inside-out fetal cows (that’s right, their skeletons are on the outside) that have developed inside the calf while it was inside its own mother. Holy crap! The wriggling spine-worms spill out of their embryonic sacs like angry mutated maggots. Of course, one of the filthy buggers escapes their quick death-by-squishing and provides the next hour of ‘action’.

From slithering up into the bed to climbing through the rafters, this little dude does it all. They even try to one-up the Alien franchise by using not a chest-burst, but a total thru-and-thru, revealing a large hole burrowed through our poor vet-lady (no, you don't get to see that happen). It also turns out that the creature’s quick growth allows it to gestate inside humans and steal the best bits of our DNA. Sadly, the promise of a skeleton-cow/human hybrid is not realized in this film. Instead, the worm just gets bigger and bigger until a cow skull is snapping at people from the darkness. I will say that the effects, especially with the little spine-worms, are pretty incredible. Making a wriggling line of bones look alive couldn't have been easy.

The movie seemed to reach it's low when the creature is seen skittering into a six-foot-deep slurry of what I assume is rainwater and cow manure. Dan attempts to ‘fish’ for the creature on his Farmerall, and, in a moment of supreme horror-movie stupidity, only succeeds in flooding the engine and stranding himself in the opaque goop. I guess Dan thought his tractor was made to drive underwater. John, the mad scientist, wants to maintain ownership of his creation while doing as much collateral as possible with Orla's cow-killing gun. PSHT – What was that? That was Jamie getting put down like Bessie and her creature-incubating calf.

To say this is a good movie might be a stretch. I keep swishing it around in my brain like an expensive wine: am I missing something major here? If I judged it on the first thirty or forty minutes, I would have been singing Billy O'Brien's praises. It was great to look at, the tension was slowly built, and there was potential in the concept. The attempt to make dairy cows frightening is admirable (I actually ended up feeling really badly for Bessie and her calf) and I can't help but give him points for even making this movie, but reliance upon too many genre cliches left my brain splattered on the floor like poor ol Bessie’s. Perhaps if I had been more of an open-minded kid and experienced more horror through the years, I would appreciate this piece more. If I ever go back to it, I might eat my words and praise the film. It wouldn't be my first time. I will say that if you and your friends want to look at a beautifully shot film and have a few laughs (MST3K style), then by all means, see this film. If you're into creature features and a horror connoisseur, check it out and let me know what you think. I'd like to hear other's opinions. For some kinder reviews, check out Bloody Disgusting and Video Updates.