Infection

A “Bumkin Films” FILM
WRITTEN BY Tarquin Lestrade

A Sci-fi Mocku-horror-mentary

Captain Edward Cockburn of the mineral survey ship “Scrutinizer” is a fucking dickhead. The crew knows it and deep down he knows it.

He’s only the Captain of this outdated rust-bucket (imagine a grotty Kazakhstani fishing trawler and then transpose it into space...in the future...as a spaceship) because his Dad owns the company. The monumentally boring task of lugging through the outer reaches of the Centauri system to find potentially rape-able planets is only punctuated by the odd chance to fleece an indigenous population of some valuable artefacts on a strictly banned ground mission. That and the occasional graphic and very public v-mail from the Captain’s girlfriend back home, proudly displayed on the main bridge screen for the crew's benefit, and even worse, his puke-makingly porn-tastic replies.

Until the ship gets infected by a foreign virus from one of their illicit forays to the surface.

At first it seems like another routine breakdown (not uncommon on this tub). Simon the navigator, who has long endured the Captain’s cruel taunting for his lisp, is the first to go as he spacewalks to fix the tracking system and is impaled outside the ship on the tether arm.

Gradually it dawns on the crew that a mysterious organism is starting to take control of the ship. Things start to horribly wrong: the artificial gravity becomes intermittent, wreaking havoc in the toilets. The temperature control goes on the blink, forcing everyone to strip to their underwear (to varying degrees of success). The main thruster stops, forcing the captain to send a team to fix it, ending in carnage. One by one, the crew are picked off in more bizarre and gooey ways until the only two left standing are the Captain and Shelley, the sexy Comms officer who everyone wants to shag.

Can they work together to rid the ship of the infection? When she said she wouldn’t sleep with him if he were the last man in the galaxy, did she really mean it? Can someone that everybody hates, including the audience, really end up as the sole survivor in a horror film?