You know how some movies start out really slowly and then grab you by the throat at some point? Unfortunately, this isn't one of those movies.

Contagio is torturously slow and underdeveloped. It starts with a whole lot of nothing happening and retains its torturously slow pace throughout 93 of the longest minutes you will ever spend in your life. I was amazed to learn that the filming took place in Mississippi (six days of shooting in all) -- not only does this have the look and feel of a bad foreign horror film, the two stars of the show cannot possibly speak English as their first language, routinely emphasizing the wrong syllables of words.

Oh, but the fight scenes, such as they are, are a real sight to behold. It's as if the filmmakers wanted to film the fights in slow motion but couldn't afford the equipment to do so -- so they just told the actors to pretend to perform in slow motion. Apparently, they couldn't afford a fight choreographer, either, because the lead actress also serves in that capacity.

If you get off on watching people walk aimlessly through the woods, this is your movie. All we learn about the main characters is that they are a couple who have embarked on a camping vacation in some nameless national forest. After far too much walking, they finally pitch a tent, do what young couples alone in the woods tend to do, and then shuffle off the next morning to meet their destiny. That involves a hole, a crashed satellite, a dark cloud of something that does very bad things to the human body, and government goons in Hazmat suits who arrive on scene to make sure the truth about what has happened never has a chance to get out.

I love blood and gore as much as any horror fan on Earth, but I'm not overly fond of using excessive gore as a crutch to make up for bad writing, bad acting, bad cinematography, etc. There aren't that many gory scenes in Contagio, but every one of them is excessively gory -- usually in a pretty obviously fake way.

OK, I'll admit I did enjoy watching what has to be the longest scene in cinema history of some poor bloke trying to keep his insides from falling out, but the rest of it really didn't do it for me -- largely because I knew the filmmakers were relying on the gore just to sell the film. Mind-numbingly boring with scattered moments of excessive gore -- that's Contagio in a nutshell.