Horror Review: Bite
Three girls out in Costa Rica for a bachelorette party/vacation between them. The Bride herself still has some misgivings about the marriage as her fiance really is interested in children while she herself is not. This is shot in a found footage style, bringing the viewer closer to the characters while they have a wild time..and even the bride’s drink gets spiked. During this vacation the group travels to a swimming hole mentioned by some of the natives there. Once there they wade into this murky but beautiful blue tinted pond. Our Bride to be gets bit by something in the pond. This ends their little excursion and they make their way back to the resort where more partying and some regretful actions take place. The acting is a little bland here and for a found footage sequence that sort of hurts the characters.
Once back home, the filming style changes to a more traditional style which fits the actors better. Our bride now has a few things to tell her fiancee but she has a fear about doing so with only a week away from the wedding. His mother is heavy into ritual and he himself is under her roof literally, he lives in the apartment complex his mother is landlord to. He does not stay over with his bride keeping the ritual of no sex before marriage intact.
Her ideas about children and the marriage start changing though as that little bite becomes much more. Changing her into something of pure instinct to create young in a rather nasty way. Her body seeps a slime and small round eggs appear around the house as she slips deeper into this haze and holes herself up within her apartment.
The special effects are very well done, it doesn’t overdo the transformation, matching the 3 or 4 day span this movie takes place in, it does enough to transform her and dress the whole apartment in a slimy mess of eggs, and other liquids oozing from her body in many scenes. The change was still minimal but enough to show her shift into this insectoid creature in a believable way. I can see those not used to more..gooey things to be sickened by this movie.
The pacing of the movie is slow, with nothing very significant happening until the halfway point, even then we get small hints of what is going on to keep us waiting. It keeps this pace up with only a slight faster kick towards the end but still it is not overly fast sort of mimicking an unchecked disease with small bursts of greater injury but overall is a slow withering we are presented, escalating in intensity not speed.
I felt this leaned toward a Power of Nature movie with sprinkles of Body Horror and Creature Feature. We see this woman who at the beginning is not interested or unable to have children, going along with her friends and how her fiance wishes to do things. After she is infected, she finds herself surrounded by thousands of children and being more forceful in her decisions with her Fiancee and her friends.
I would recommend this movie for those into body horror along with fans of creatures. It does a good job of that transformation while not as extreme a change as we saw in something like The Thing or Cronenburg’s works it still has that element there. We see the life cycle of these creatures so we are at the same time learning about these things as we watch the movie.
It does have its small plot holes like with all this screaming no one other than the landlady comes to check up on her in an apartment building. Nothing really brought the movie down for me though and I look forward to its release next year if they find enough interest.
