Ora
Blackwood is a flexible artist. She can do nature studies in the Audubon tradition
and macabre scenes worthy of Weird Tales magazine
covers. That makes her a perfect protag for this period sf/horror hybrid. Get
ready for some full contact botany in Sasha Louis Vukovic’s Flora (trailer here), which releases
today on BluRay.
In
1929, Victorin University’s best and brightest botany grad students have come
to join their professor’s rain forest expedition. Unfortunately, when they
arrive, they find his campsite deserted and the food-stores have been nearly
all incinerated. Right from the start, they face a crisis situation, because their
next supply delivery is not expected for a month. They cannot hunt or gather either,
because there seems to be no animal life anywhere to be found, not even insects.
There is only green-leaf flora.
Their
outlook goes from bad to worse when they finally find their professor—dead, of
course. Being brainy, his protégé Matsudaira Basho figures out there is some
sort of poisonous super-pollen infecting the greenery. Rather inconveniently,
they are more likely to die from suffocation when the pollen inevitably rises
than from its toxicity, so the clock is ticking.
Whatever
Vukovic’s background might be, he either researched botany with admirable
thoroughness or he can fake it like a champ. There are plot points in Flora that will make even experienced
genre fans stop and think: “huh, that’s interesting.” A particularly notable
example would be the extended sequence involving the preparation of otherwise
noxious weeds for human consumption.
There
is no question Flora is an ultra-low
budget film, so you have to work with it a little. This is not a high-gloss,
pre-packaged cookie-cutter studio film. Unfortunately, that also means the
ensemble is a little uneven. Nevertheless, the final four going into the third
act are all quite strong (they would be Teresa Marie Doran, Sari Mercer, Caleb
Noel, and Dan Lin).
