For years I've been watching late night trash on the Sky3 channel in the UK, which seems to show the kind of films that the Sci-Fi Channel makes. 99% of what I see there is absolutely awful, but occasionally something decent will come along to enliven things (MANEATER and the so-trashy-it's-great AZTEC REX are two that spring to mind). Over the years, I've been less than impressed with the low budget alien siege movies, of which INFECTED is one, but I was delighted to find that this is far better than the usual fare.
Things kick off in high gear with the kind of intense conspiracy stuff you'd see in one of the early X-FILES episodes. From there we accelerate into the kind of aliens-are-already-here-and-in-disguise schtick that allows producers to bypass special effects in favour of human adversaries. Eventually, it devolves into the usual kind of nonsense with the heroes being hunted by their extraterrestrial foes while various people are shot/blown up/kidnapped en route. The film focuses on gruesome effects shots of alien maggots emerging from their human hosts, while saving up a highly cheesy CGI shot for late on in the proceedings (let's just say I was reminded of the '50s B-movies of old.
Surprisingly, the casting isn't too bad for this outing, with both Gil Bellows and Maxim Roy proving able leads with more talent than most. While the villains are pretty weak and unimposing, a couple of "name" actors are reserved for kooky cameo roles (Judd Nelson and Isabella Rossellini) which ups the ante a little. Hardly a great movie, but if you're a purveyor of this kind of crap you won't be complaining as this is a cut above the rest.
