Unrest (2006)

Unrest is a movie about medical students doing the kind of stuff they do, which is awesome. I'm glad we finally have a movie that doesn't marginalize them, and fully shows their true identities as detectives who figure out why ghosts are haunting the place. That's just what I wanted.

Director: Jason Todd Ipson

Starring: Corri English, Scot Davis

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

This was one of the Eight Films to Die For series that mostly polluted Blockbuster shelves a lot back in the 2000s. I don't know why they were 'to die for.' Honestly, a lot of them were pretty middling in quality and I doubt anyone would throw themselves on a sword for these movies or run back into a burning house to grab them. The only way someone might DIE for a movie like Unrest is if you dropped it in the street in front of your house while going to throw it in the garbage, and then the garbage truck hit and killed you.

Also, I'm pretty sure these movies were the reason Blockbuster shut down. That's a bit of a conspiracy theory, but trust me on this.

The film starts out with a couple of doofus coroners checking out the tits on this body that just came in. In these kinds of movies, there's never a point where they DON'T make dumb jokes about how hot a woman corpse is – it's like some kind of fucking rite of passage to be a bad horror movie coroner.

"Alright, Jim. Are you ready to spew this uninspired dialogue?"

Then we get our main character, a blonde med student who apparently lives in the janitor closet in the hospital. We find out later this is because her grant money hasn't come in, but honestly I think it's because she's a millennial and this seems like luxury to her compared to the actual apartments she's lived in. Woohoo, housing market!

"This is the nicest place I've ever slept in!"

The first day of class, we find out med school is really just a wacky, fun place where students do things like push down on a corpse to squirt corpse juice into the mouths of their fellow students! I'm sure that won't cause any random disease outbreaks or horrific Resident Evil or Walking Dead style disease. Seriously, how did nobody get expelled from school for shit like this?

Amidst that is the one guy in their group constantly flirting with her and trying to get her to fuck him. I guess this is to be expected – I mean, that IS what women go to these schools for, right? I like how they tell her not to get too personal when she starts wondering about what happened to cause the strange wounds on the corpse's body. Because the GUYS weren't being weird at all when they said she was into kinky bondage sex, but an honest wondering about what happened to her is “too personal.” Sure.

One of the other guys has a fiance who comes by and wants to see one of the bodies. I guess this is why she was with him – she was just biding her time for when he was actually in a place where he'd let her touch a body with her bare hands. Because yeah, that's what she does, just touches this dead body with her bare hands. Is every character in this thing just willingly going to spread the virus that kills all of humanity and turns the world into some dystopia hellhole? 'Cause touching magic enchanted corpses is kind of how you do that.

Then, like clockwork, she runs out in the hallway feeling ill, and when her fiance finds her, she's dead and there's blood all over the floor somehow.

Oh no, she died from... some unexplained thing we'll never go back to, but it has to do with that corpse I guess!

On Monday, everyone just comes back to class like normal... somehow the fact that a woman died for vague reasons after touching a corpse never caused any alarm, because no one knows about it until the professor comes up to their group in class and privately tells them about it. Like what, is people dying in this hospital from inappropriate contact with corpses so prevalent that it barely even registers anymore? I think this scene raises more questions than answers, but then again, people have always accused me of thinking too hard!

The main girl, apparently cursed to be in possession of actual brain cells, thinks there's something weird about the corpse that people die after touching. She tells her professor about it, and he just dismisses her as crazy – just one of those kuh-razy women, with their weirdo theories and estrogen and what not. I'm sure he's right and it's all fine, and the rest of the movie is here for no reason except to show her happily becoming a doctor.

"I'm just the stereotypical stick in the mud character here to step on your dreams."

I guess she takes a break from wondering about that to go out with that other guy and have sex with him. Which is, you know, fine, but why are we watching a movie about it? Is this movie under the impression that these characters are rich and interesting enough that we want to see what they do in the bedroom? Because I dunno about you, but I am thinking no.

There are some more scenes of the girl trying to figure out what happened to this corpse – because I guess med students are just doing the jobs of detectives now. That's what budget cuts do to you, I suppose. I wonder what the scene was like where the real cops found this body and apparently did no investigating on it at all...

DETECTIVE 1: We found a body out in the field! It's naked and all cut up with scars and cuts!

DETECTIVE 2: Really? Well, that is just super fucking boring.

DETECTIVE 1: Yeah, you're right. Just dump it in the coroner van and forget it. Now let's go down to the bar and pick up chicks and not investigate this at all!

DETECTIVE 2: Woohoo, it's fucking awesome being a detective!

The rest of the movie is mostly taken up by the same old cliché crap you expect from these movies – main girl talks to this older woman at the school who believes her about the corpse being supernatural, and plenty of more scenes of researching why everything is happening, combined with random sex and flirting scenes of main girl and whatever-his-name-is. It's like they just put together an Ad Libs version of a horror movie. I guess none of it is TOO bad, but is that really an accomplishment? Just not being AS bad as other bullshit movies?

I do like this one part where they figure out that the corpse is actually from an Aztec temple or something down in Brazil. They ask the one Spanish guy they know to help them translate their Portugese research documents, and he says Brazilians don't speak Spanish, so he can't help. They tell him his Spanish is still better than their not knowing of any other language – what a bunch of racists. But it turns out they're right and he's able to tell them exactly what they need to know. Because stupidity is all encompassing.

Then we find out that the woman used to be an archaeologist until she went to this ancient burial site in South America, at which point she became a prostitute and started killing her johns after giving them blowjobs. Wow. Had to find some way to fit a prostitute in there, huh? I love that it doesn't even really matter – she could've been anything and still had the main plot of killing people in this hospital. But they went nope, prostitute is the job most women have, so we gotta go with that!

"Bad lighting, no character, no plot. 1/10. This movie sucks."

The Spanish guy dies next, and the ghost is at least courteous enough to give him a warning:

I hope the ghost paid for that textbook she defaced...

Oh, and the next day, NOW everyone notices the dead body on campus... I guess this one was just more noticeable and stood out more.

Throughout all of this, the British doctor guy teaching the class staunchly refuses to do anything or consider that something supernatural might be going on. There have been like five deaths in this movie and he still is just like “how dare you think there's some connection between this and that corpse we brought in JUST before they started?” I guess life is easier when you're just a fucking moron. They finally make him get rid of it, and he says he does...

BUT... it turns out he didn't, and instead just tossed it in the tank full of body parts in the lab, like nobody would ever fucking notice. Then people keep dying and it's like, whoops. But at least our heroes are here to try and get the body out – by taking their shirts off.

Why are they doing that? Like, you're already dipping into nasty corpse water anyway. Who cares if your scrubs get dirty? Are those the only ones you were allowed to have, so you have to make sure they don't get dirty? That's what budget cuts do to you, I guess. Or it could just be because of boobs. I dunno.

They finally burn the body and take its ashes all the way to fucking Brazil to bury – how they got there, I don't know. I mean the girl was sleeping in the hospital because she didn't have any money. Did they sleep in the luggage bay of the plane for really cheap?

But they scatter the ashes, only to realize a second later that the spirit is actually, maybe, still back in the lab! DUN DUN DUN... oh, wait, they have no basis to think that and it's actually just sort of random. I love that they're not even 100 percent sure - they just kinda THINK the spirit could still be there. What a half-assed cliffhanger. It's like the agnosticism of movies - you're not really sure and it's all very wishy-washy and noncommittal.

That was Unrest, the frankly kinda dull movie about corpse superpowers and people dying in a hospital! What did we think of it? Eh. That's really about it – just, “eh.” It wasn't the worst thing ever, but there wasn't much of interest. I mean, a few mildly silly things happened, and there were some odd plot decisions, but it was hardly like the new The Room or Troll 2 or anything, so it couldn't even succeed on that front. It was just sort of a middle of the road, bland adventure. So unless you really want to see, uh, people dying in a hospital but from ghosts instead of medical causes... you probably won't love this movie.

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