- Director: Thomas Haley
- Writer: Dan Jagels
- Stars: Thomas Haley, Corey Sorenson, Jessica Cameron
- Run Time: 1 Hours, 28 Minutes
Synopsis
A woman jogging on the beach finds a man lying there by the water. He’s alive, but bloody and sick-looking. “Please help” he says as he dies. The girl screams as credits roll. We are told that infected people filled the hospitals as doctors raced to find a cure. Life, as we know it, has changed.
Tim Reynolds sneaks into a doctor’s office and locks the door; he’s hiding from someone out there. He digs around and finds some Spam and energy bars. He feeds his mouse, Rufus, some of it. He sits down to sleep, looks at pictures of his dead family, and starts to cry.
He finds a mannequin with a name tag that says, “Gabriel” on it. Tim gets to work researching for a cure for the virus. We heard that he’s been working for thirteen days, but has had no luck. Rufus is still healthy, so he knows there is a vaccine possible, but he can’t find the right one. He’s got lesions all over his skin under his clothes and he’s coughing up blood.
There’s a banging at the door, and Tim has an attack and passes out. He wakes up surrounded by doctors who want to send him away. Then Tim wakes up and sees that he was dreaming about the doctors; he’s lying on the floor of the office.
He searches the place and funds a gun and one bullet. Later, he finds a dog, but the dog belongs to two other guys who have broken into the same office. He hides, and they leave. He finds a dead girl and he gives her the closest thing to a funeral that he can manage in the office.
Then he finds a live girl who passes out. He patches her up, and she explains that she wants to go to Zone 6, which surprises Tim. Her name is Kimberly, and she was told that Zone 6 is helping the sick people; Tim has heard they are more like concentration camps. She leaves him fairly quickly, eager to be on her way. Tim watches as the CDC guys sedate her and put her in the back of their SUV.
Tim starts talking to Gabriel the mannequin, and before long, he starts hearing it talk back. Gabriel convinces Tim to keep working on a cure. After an “experimentation montage” he has an injection to test, but Rufus is pretty badly off. Tim needs to get to the lab tomorrow in order to get enough materials to make more for himself, as Rufus has recovered. The cure works!
He writes the formula for the cure down and dies before he ever gets out of the office. There are flashing lights outside— did he call for the CDC? Will anyone find the paper with the cure on it? We don’t know.
Commentary
It’s got a really good soundtrack for a low budget film, although it plays some pretty climactic chords in odd places. Who knew stripping insulation from a wire could be so dramatic? The soundtrack is especially important here, since the huge majority of the film has no dialog and often it’s just Tim talking to himself.
Most of the film takes place in a dark, dimly-lit office, and yet you can see everything. This is how you do a dark scene!
Nitpicks: Tim sleeps next to a fish tank that still had living fish with no food or electricity. He uses a payphone without putting in any money. Could a microwave really be run off a single car battery?
It’s more of a psychological drama than a horror film, but it’s a post-plague apocalyptic world, so that sorta counts. It’s really a one-man-show, and Thomas Haley really pulls it off. It’s slow-paced, and not much really happens. By all rights, it ought to be really boring, but it wasn’t.