Pandemic (2009)

Directed by: Jason Connery

Writer: Aaron Pope

 

This movie begins with a man riding a horse and then dying a horrible virus-like death. He didn't even live enough to see out the opening credits, which I imagine was very disappointing to him. Soon after that, a young veterinarian Sydney visits a farmer named Spenser, whose filly is suffering a horrible agony, as if something is eating her skin. Spenser mercifully kills her, but that's not nearly the end of it. Soon other similar deaths start to occur all around the small county of Diablo, New Mexico. It's not long before military arrives and quarantines everything, which is the moment you know crap hit the fan. But the truth is even more terrifying than it looks (insert The Twilight Zone melody).

 

First of all, what really sucked about this movie is that it's actually not horror, but a thriller. The infected people simply die, without turning into crazy bloodthirsty zombie-like creatures. The same goes for animals. Imagine if the authors were brave enough to turn this into a movie about zombie horses! One can only dream...

 

Anyway, what happens next is not a large scale apocalyptic pandemic scenario (despite the movie's title), but a rather low key story about two main characters trying to get to the bottom of the things. Was everything just an accident or is the truth even more terrifying? (insert The Twilight Zone theme again) Sydney is calm and rational, while Spenser is an (apparently) crazy conspiracy theorist who blames the Government for everything. Sydney doesn't take him seriously at the beginning, but when the military forces blatantly attack them on the road in the night, she has to at least consider his side of the story. The truth is of course more horrifying than any of us could have imagined.

 

If you visit the IMDb page for this movie, you will see a low grade and a flood of bad reviews, criticising the story, the direction and pretty much everything else. Now, you can't really argue much against it, this is certainly far from the best movie ever made, but I found it a decent time waster. The reason is probably that I'm a sucker for the conspiracy theories and I found the two leads not too disgusting. I also liked the ending, where (spoiler) it turns out that the truth was even more terrifying than a Japanese long-haired ghost (end of spoiler), and for that I even forgave the lack of zombies, or horror in general. But, the problem for the filmmakers is that not everyone is as tolerant as I am, so I think the low grade is probably because the movie didn't feature any zombie horses.