Coco and Pipi are at the supermarket. She's very pregnant, he's grumpy at best. People are running like anything away from the supermarket as they check out. They arrive home, after seeing others rushing, some with as many groceries as they can tote.There is some plague in Argentina, Mexico, USA, Canada, UK, Spain, and other countries. Air flights are canceled; some chain stores are closed. One couple in their apartment building was detained by the health authorities for testing. Armed people in hazmat suits inform them that their building is quarantined. A quick total indicates there are 16 people in the building, plus a live in maid. They are closed off with plastic at first. Coco's cough causes some concern.Coco inventories the refrigerator and the rest of the kitchen for rationing purposes. The health folks drop by to give a physical checkup of everyone. Zanutto visits them to borrow a power adapter. They read a lot and play board games. At the beginning, at least, the water and power stay on.The level of the outbreak rises. There is not enough street traffic and police to keep the streets safe at night. A couple of the other tenants have lowered themselves to holding up other tenants using a hammer. On the other hand, Horacio gives them light bulbs, some extra breathing protection, and a pistol, which Coco hides rather than tell Pipi. The alert level rises again, to 7, whatever that means. Horacio meets Coco to give him direct instructions about using the hazmat suit. They meet with Lange, Guglierini, and one other to discuss Zanutto. It turns out the three bachelors are running out of food.So, we have an exercise in the politics of scarcity. Horacio is a survivalist, and a mason, of sorts. He has no intentions of putting up with the bachelors' thieving ways, and he gives Coco some instruction on how to booby trap his apartment to repel intruders.Will the thieves get what they want? Well, no. Zanutto has quite a surprise waiting for them.How does it all pan out? Will the plague be ended? Will some of the tenants survive? ------Scores--------Cinematography: 8/10 There was the occasional soft focus plus large scale darkness.Sound: 10/10 No problems.Acting: 8/10 Daniel Hendler, Jazmin Stuart, Yayo Guridiand, Federico Luppi were all quite good.Screenplay: w/10 Fails as a comedy: no belly laughs, no chuckles, no "isn't that the truth?" moments. As SciFi, it was a wash, since there were no SciFi elements. As a gore fest, it was a bit weak. As drama, it was reasonably strong. The shock of people acting differently under different rules is pretty strong, as is the sight of blasted bodies to those who have never seen them. Much of this movie was about ordinary people dealing with these challenges.

Drama? Comedy? Apocalyptic horror? Yes to all three. This has all the elements needed to make a great story. It will appeal to horror fans - 2nd amendment enthusiasts - doomsday preppers - conspiracy theorists - gun enthusiasts - even pregnant ladies!!!!This story is about the swift decline of society due to a flu pandemic - is well written - well acted - good special effects - with a cheesy enough score to remind you of the best of grade B drive in movies. I enjoyed it thoroughly.First - the relationship between the star of the show Martin and his pregnant wife is great - he's so not ready for an apocalypse - and for the first 25% of the movie they are "Business as usual - what's all the fuss?" (a la Sean of the Dead). He pulls typical husband stunts like not checking the light bulb he just bought, but he recovers from that blinder with the use of a black light in his apartment which gives them all a 70's neon glow.One thing you'll learn is when the apocalypse comes, look for a friend like Horatio. Talk about some body who is ready!!! He made me want to run to the Kroger's store and gun store before the end of the movie. (Can you say Michael Gros in the first Tremors? - Horatio has a better stash of weapons.) But the highlight of the movie is the writing and the humor. The neighbors trying to convince their other neighbor that they "just want to talk" as they wave a meat tenderizer around. The Health Inspector who is obviously on his last legs. Martin in the astronaut's outfit - turning his face light on when they are stalking Zanutto. ("TUrn it off, you schmuck") Martin not knowing he had a pistol and not a revolver. Dialogue worthy of Sean of the Dead type humor.And the liberal use of the term "dickhead" is hilarious, and quite applicable.Plus definitely enough ineffective gun play that I thought was watching the gun fight on this week's Breaking Bad. How it is possible to shoot that many shot guns, pistols and assault weapons without hitting anyone is pretty amazing.All in all - something for everyone (unless you are a Nichols Sparks fan). Highly recommended. The Argentinians hit a home run with this one.DonB

COMMENTS: Coco (Daniel Hendler) and Pipi (Jazmin Stuart) are a naive, happy couple who do normal kinds of things, like go to the grocery on Saturday morning. This Saturday morning is different however. On their way back, people begin swarming the streets in a panic. An epidemic has broken out and if the media is to believed, it's becoming worse by the minute. Monitoring the situation from home, Coco and Pipi's evening is interrupted by floodlights and loudspeakers. Their building's been quarantined and the emergency respondents are cordoning it off under a huge plastic tent, as if the tenants are termites to be exterminated. They find themselves sealed into their own apartment complex, forbidden to leave. They can only watch from their windows as the outside world turns to bedlam around them.Bedlam is not confined to the outside for long. Inside, resources dwindle, utilities are cut off, and fellow residents get cabin fever and panic. Coco does his best to keep his head, protect Pipi, and hold down the fort.It's not easy. It turns out that doomsday scenarios aren't necessarily like fast-paced action movies. Caught in the doldrums, Coco and Pipi are stuck waiting, waiting, waiting... Instead of excitement and contingency, the experience for the group of tenants is more about nagging spouses, running out of lightbulbs and toiletries, and putting up with annoying neighbors, i.e. each other -for awhile that is.As the situation outside increases in severity, tension mounts. Pipi unwittingly works against Coco by innocently leaking critical personal information about their situation to an untrustworthy neighbor. Tenants fraction into factions. Coco must decide whether to go along with the prevailing group or stay out of it. The situation inside the complex degenerates further when under the auspices of moving a possibly infected neighbor off their floor, it becomes clear that the do-good members of the "apartment association" cell are out for their own gain. One thing leads to another and they attempt to force their way in on a fellow resident to loot his provisions.The bodies begin to pile up. Residents are dying, but is it from a hemorrhagic plague, or are they being murdered? Sadly, Coco's best option seems to be to join forces with his paranoid but gregarious, survivalist upstairs friend Horacio (Yayo Guridi). He's a nice guy, but maybe insane. Horacio's apartment turns out to be a high-tech, reinforced bunker complete with an armory of automatic weapons, electronic surveillance equipment, maps, and stacks of classified government information. Horacio wants Coco to join forces with him, and offers him a CBR protective suit and a firearm. Then he invites Coco on patrol with him through the darkened stairwells and corridors of their massive apartment building. The neighbors are up to some monkey business of their own and these nightly sojourns through the edifice's labyrinthine passages turn out to be enlightening in an upsetting and disturbing kind of way. Maybe Horacio isn't so paranoid after all. He seems to know an awful lot about what's going on, more than anyone else. But can Coco trust him? Blackly comic but subtly so, Phase 7 combines suspense, grim social commentary, and unsettling insight into human nature in a thriller format which is interrupted by moments of horror. Artfully shot and well paced, Phase 7 makes dramatically good use of camera angles and framing. Lighting is alternately glaring and sterile, and gloomily claustrophobic. This emphasizes the film's thematic contrast; the delineation between the bright, logical, outside world of society, authority and officialdom, versus the insular, isolated, inner world of sanctuary and retreat. Yet as the film goes on, we begin to detect a double meaning; authority is questionable. Society is reasonable strictly on its surface, and only so long as everything is going well. Safe refuge, once cut off from the outside world, can quickly degenerate into an insular den of suspicion, irrational fear, and schizophrenia.It's the cinematography that accomplishes this. Our sickening epiphany arrives not just from Phase 7's dialogue and action, but from a dual interpretation made possible by the very lighting and camera work itself. Ultimately, Phase 7 is about masquerade; how things -people and situations -can turn out to be something very different from their daily representations.In Phase 7, Coco discovers that he can't trust anyone or anything other than his own judgment and instincts, but the trouble comes from not knowing for sure whether his personal interpretations are sound. Under the circumstances, with little reliable input to go on, and multiple variables and potential explanations for what's happening, every course of action is a gamble. Coco must do his best to make the right choices to deliver himself and Pipi from myriad dangers which mount behind every turn of their complex's twisting stairwells, foreboding cavernous parking garage, and eerily dimmed corridors.

While indeed the topic of a world-wide virus that kills everyone is a threadbare because so much bad movies that are based on it (so much!), this very one film is EXCELLENT, in the line of REC, a must see movie you like the genre.I first caught it on I-SAT (www.isat.tv), an Argentine cable channel that specialize in non-mainstream productions, one Wednesday at 1:30 AM and since the characters where suited in bio-hazard suits and spoke in Spanish, rioplatense Spanish actually, and one of them with cordobés accent, I think the movie was actually related to El Eternauta (meaning Eternauta 'ethernal astronaut', a well known sci-fi and political comic of Argentine's seventies) soon to realize it was a totally different story.The best think of the film are without doubt the acting and the oppressive atmosphere created by a well taken camera viewpoints and background music and the special effects were pretty cool too, I absolutely buy that everything on the movie was actually happening, the guns shooting, the sick people, the dead bodies, everything.I'm giving ten stars to this movie because it actually hypnotize me to the point of stop zapping, sit down, sharap and watch and for the euphoria I feel for the next hour after the movie ended.This is a great movie that will have you in a tense suspense for more than an hour and I hope you enjoy it as I did! BTW, this is definitely not a chic movie, so if you are a woman (little girls may still enjoy it) and you don't like it please don't rate it down, this movie it isn't for you.