Hey, do you guys know my friend David Keith? Not Keith David, the badass black guy from They Live. I'm talking about the white boy. He was the dad in Firestarter,. Played Elvis in the movie Heartbreak Hotel. Brought the bread home as Squint Westwood in Ernest Goes to School, and Jack Parkman in Major League 2. And who could forget his performance as Boo-hoo Boone in The Indian in the Cupboard. I may sound like I'm patronizing Mr. Keith's career, but in point of fact I am actually a fan of his. He seems like a great guy, however he doesn't seem like someone who would direct a movie about an alien virus afflicting an apple farm...but he did.

Welcome to Tellico Plains, a small farming town in the midwest. All is fine and dandy and extremely boring (I personally hate farm living, but that's neither here nor there) until a glowing meteor streaks across the sky and explodes onto the Hayes ranch. There Papa Nathan and his horny wife (who is shacking up with the extremely hairy farmhand in his...shack) are trying to raise their kids. The big, dumb goofy kid is Cyrus, Nathan's kid from another marriage. The hero of the piece is Zack (played by Will Wheaton from Star Trek: The Next Generation). Then finally there's Alice, who is the youngest (and is played by Will Wheaton's sister, Amy).

At first everyone wants to just ignore it and when the meteorite melts away into slime and seeps into the ground most of the townspeople rejoice the fact that they don't have to bring outside people in to muck about their town. Unfortunately for them, the slime from space has affected the drinking supply of the whole town, but most notably the Hayes family. The food goes rotten and oozes with yellowish-brown sludge. All the apples start to rot and house hundreds of maggots. The animals start acting strangely and little Alice is attacked and almost killed by a flock of rampaging chickens that she was calmly feeding. Even poor old Cyrus gets the shit kicked out of him when a horse goes bananas and tries to crush his head with its hooves. The mom starts developing bloody warts on her face and acting increasingly bizarre. Zack starts to realize something is going wrong and gets the local doctor involved. He tests the water and finds that there are high-levels of a strange new mineral saturating it and it could lead to terrible side effects. Terrible side-effects indeed. It isn't long before Zack's family starts falling apart all together.

The mom deteriorates into a monstrous, murderous zombie that eventually melts away. Cyrus develops puss-filled boils and vomits yellowish sludge every once and a while. Nathan (I forgot to mention that he's played by TV's Claude Akins from a ton of stuff...look him up) grabs a wrench and starts spouting religious doctrine as Zack tries to keep his sister safe. They have stayed healthy by not drinking the water from their well and not eating the slimy, rancid dishes their mom has been serving up. In the end they are surrounded by their zombified family when Willis (played by John Schneider from the classic, yet shitty, Dukes of Hazzard show) comes to the rescue. Willis was in town surveying the land and got caught up in the alien water craziness. The kids are rescued as the house starts to shake and shiver and tear itself apart as if it were violently haunted. This makes no sense of course because the house cannot drink water, so how would it affect the house and make it rock off of its foundations? No answers to that one.

This film was setting itself up to be amazing, but it was quite a letdown. The slow build to the final act was not appreciated and I found myself bored a lot of the time. The characters are all broad stereotypes and the direction is as plain-Jane as you can get. The script is weak, and fails to deliver the town full of zombie people we were expecting and just relegates the "action" to a small farm house. The plot had some major promise, but the setting was dull and the execution was lame. The effects were nice though. There were some excellent splat-tastic images, but beyond that we get a half-baked story with no room to spread out.

So begins a new journey. This is part one of four. Jorge and I have decided to divide most film series to make sure we bring you a fair and balanced look at collected works, like we did with the atrocious Witchcraft series, which I think we both agree should not exist. I will be handling the review for part 2, which is about snake monsters so it sounds promising, and then I will hand the reins over to Jorge for the last two installments in the forgettable The Curse series. Join us, won't you?

- Jose Prendes