MOLD! (2012)

Streaming on Tubi!
Directed by Neil Meschino.
Written by Dave Fogerson, Neil Meschino.
Check out the trailer here!!

Best described as THE STUFF meets STREET TRASH, MOLD! works well as a virus-style horror film as well as a spreading ooze film. The budget is low, but when it comes to a practical special effects showcase, MOLD! excels with honors. Though I’m quickly getting tired of comedy horror these days with so many films relying on making fun of monsters instead of concentrating on making them scary, MOLD! feels like a low-grade eighties throwback with a fun tone, hokey faux science gone wrong story, and great effects.

The story centers on Ronald Reagan’s battle against drugs during the eighties. Top scientists are looking for a way to combat the growing drug problem and one scientist in a top-secret science facility bunker comes up with a mold that eats just about everything. The intention is to drop a vial of the mold spore into the air, and it eats up the drug crop of third world countries. Of course, the effect on humans is not taken into consideration until the spore is accidentally made airborne through a series of wonky lab mishaps by some of the clumsiest scientists I’ve ever seen. Soon the science team, along with an army Colonel and his devoted soldier, are trapped in the bunker with green mold forming on the walls, in the water system, and on the people themselves.

The story is a throwback to films like THE BLOB, “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verill” sequence in CREEPSHOW, and the aforementioned STREET TRASH as the mold eats away at anything in its path and seems to be unstoppable. The story lags after a goofy lab experiment gone wrong sequence at the beginning as the group is trapped in a room trying to figure out a cure for the spore as they get picked off and contaminated one by one. Thankfully, the ending of MOLD! goes over the top and back again with tons of gore and grossout moments of dismemberment, melting, and oozing.

As I said above, the highlight here is the special effects. Everything from practical application to dummies covered in green decay, to tons of slime, to stop motion is used to convey the different dangerous aspects of the funky fungi. My favorite being some nice stop motion animation of the spreading and growing mold. For the low budget of the film, it is downright admirable what the filmmakers were able to pull off.

There’s some decent acting going on here. The tone is mildly camp, but not overly so with over-the-top characters intermingling with folks playing it straight. There are a lot of goofy moments and moments of groan as most of the trapped Colonel’s dialog consists of action movie titles. But MOLD! redeems itself by the end with the gore-de-force, almost as if it is rewarding the viewer for enduring the tedious middle portion.