Now this is a flick you need to track down. It's such an odd & entertaining mixture of things, it easily gains some extra points for sheer originality. Now dig this: The little town of Sleepy Rock's teenage social outcast - Jake, who lives in a ramshackle wooden shack and has to bear the trauma of having burned down his parents' house, killing them in the process - gets attacked by a mysterious black, hairy creature one night. He manages to shoot it and the thing just dissolves in the nightly rain. But, having sustained injuries, Jake now is infected with something and becomes the carrier and instigator of a plague the likes you've never seen before. The infection spreads through inanimate objects only - literately anything you can imagine, from books to trees and what not else - and people who touch such an infected object get consumed by it. And that's basically just the backdrop (main threat) for the whole plot. Because while a fierce storm has isolated the whole town, all its inhabitants pretty much go crazy and turn onto one another. What all happens next, you'll have to witness for yourself. All I can say is that there's a lot going on in this film, often pushing the boundaries of common sense to a ridiculous extent. For instance...: People go on a cat hunt to collect as many cats possible for testing if or not inanimate objects are infected (yes, that includes throwing some innocent kitten against a wall to see if the poor thing dissolves or not). Some priest preaches religious madness, gathering a flock of believers. Some doctor tries to save the town while protecting the carrier. Two clans set off an all out war against each other as if they were the sole survivors in some imaginative post-apocalyptic world. Children are hunted down & killed. A naked woman gets consumed by a mirror. And you haven't seen the end of it yet. There's some blackly humorous ways about this film, yet it's hard to pinpoint where all it might have been intended or not. There's some strange symbolism of various sorts spread throughout the film and allegedly the whole 'infection' can be interpreted as a metaphor for the AIDS virus (at the time uprising as the most dangerous disease of the '80s). Although I imagine it can be as easily interpreted as a reference to the medieval black plague. "The Carrier" seems a pretty obscure and forgotten film and naturally it doesn't have the best of production values. As much as the whole story might get ridiculous on numerous occasions, it's also very original & tense. Pretty much unlike any other movie you've ever seen before.
Review of The Carrier
The Carrier
(1988)
Very strange things are happening in Sleepy Rock, and that's no understatement.
15 October 2011