Isolation

Year of Release: 2005
Genre:  Horror / Thriller
IMDB Rating: 5.9 / 10
Level of Awful: Low – Medium

WHAT ITS ABOUT:

Failing all else, this one definitely gets points for creativity. Writer / Director Billy O’Brien clearly sat down one day and, much to his credit, thought: ‘What hasn’t been done in a movie before?’. The answer: inside-out cows. Slow moving, viral infested, flesh-eating, pint-sized inside-out cows. And it’s one of those movies that you are either going to love or be left utterly in the dark with. Personally I fell into the latter group, hence this post.

Somewhere, on a dark and stormy night on a rural farm in the middle of Ireland, a bio-genetics company slaves away to create more productive cows. The way to accomplish this? Make sure that calves are born already pregnant. And pregnant in multiples. This way, more and more cows are born faster and faster, ensuring that the beef and dairy market are kept in constant supply. Shockingly, these experiments go wrong. The first calf born of this process has fangs. Skew fangs, but fangs nonetheless. And it’s pregnant with six little offspring, the next step in the mass-production process gone horribly wrong: inside-out cows from hell. While the scientists manage to kill 5 of the inside-out offspring and its skew-fanged vampire mother, one manages to escape and begins to slither its way to creating havoc.

Since the inside-out little bovine is itself made up of a fast-replicating bacteria, anything it bites – human or cow – will begin to suffer from the same genetic problems that resulted in its creation. Young couple Jamie and Mary, along with scientist Orla and farm owner Dan, must now go off in pursuit of this little creature before it is able to escape the farm and infect the world’s human population. Unfortunately, it has already started with the other livestock on the farm…

Again, you have to judge this one for yourself.

THINGS I’VE LEARNED:

• Inside-out cows, with a very firm exoskeleton, can only squirm slowly in order to move around. Somehow there is a direct correlation between the speed of its movement and the ability of the victim to run away.
• Inside-out cows, while very slow to grow in the first hour of the movie, will explode to the size of an alligator in the last 15 minutes before it is killed.
• Running away in terror is preferable to simply stepping on a slow-moving ankle biter.
• Monsters instinctively know that, when quarantine is in effect, that it shouldn’t go outside the gate.
• When inside-out cows are on the rampage, regular cows will crawl into drains to be eaten by them.
• While inside-out cows can chew through the metal outside of cars and caravans in minutes, a regular cow carcass would take a swarm of them days to complete.