Macabre…ish Horror Review: Contracted: Phase 2
Contracted: Phase 2, 2015/ 1 hr 18 min
After Samantha (Najarra Townsend) bites her mother (Caroline Williams) and is shot by police, she ends up in the morgue and during the autopsy her abdominal cavity is full of decay and worms.
Meanwhile, Riley (Matt Mercer), is getting tested for everything after suffering some of the same symptoms Sam had. While in the doctor’s office he find’s one of Sam’s fingernails embedded in his back.
Later, he’s called into the police department for an interview and answers questions about Alice (Alice MacDonald). Who he saw dead in her tub but she woke up and attacked him, she stopped when he accidentally stabbed her in the mouth.
Then there are questions about Samantha and BJ (Morgan Peter Brown). The police have 4 bodies and 3 missing.
By the 4th day, a man, probably BJ aka Brent Jaffee, who has a police radio in his car, injects a woman with something after she performs oral sex on him. He is a wanted man, on the news for multiple sexual assaults.
Meanwhile, Riley is getting more symptoms, he’s freezing, he has wounds that are festering instead of healing. He also gets the news that he is STD free and it’s lucky he doesn’t have what Samantha had. The news around the clinic is it was some kind of necrotic STD. Riley immediately realizes he has what she had.
It would seem, BJ is some kind of dooms day cultist, he wants to punish everyone and sees mankind as bacteria. And the police have found his lair.
Riley is rapidly breaking down and having horrible nose bleeds and sensitive hearing that began at a memorial. He bled into a bowl of dip before he sneezed gore all over the bathroom and left.
Meanwhile the police are combing BJ’s domain, there are photos on the walls of people they recognize and a woman hanging from hooks in her back. Upon seeing the officers she tears herself free and attacks.
And Riley doesn’t have long until his change is complete. On the news there’s a virus outbreak and the discovery of decomposed women and as Riley leaves the house, his grandmother sits in her chair, a zombie, unbeknownst to him.
Soon a devision of Homeland Security, Chemical Biological Defense arrives in town to warn the cops about Jaffee. They need to contain the viral pathogen that he carries and is actively spreading.
As for Riley, in an act of desperation, he is cutting worms out of his body with a box cutter in a gas station bathroom. Then he’s back on the run from BJ (who drugged him at the bar and threatened him) and searching for any friends who are still alive to see if they’re infected.
Out of options and in a serious state of decay, Riley decides he needs to find BJ and try to stop him but he’s intercepted by the police. There will be a final show down at the hospital when BJ arrives to execute his ultimate plan.
This film, though directed by a different director (Josh Forbes) than the first movie, Contracted, it is a direct continuation. It not only picks up from the end of the first movie, it has most of the same actors and flashbacks to the first film. This continues the story nicely and is paced well. It’s a little gory than the first but not by much. The zombie effects and acting is good.