A campy, sci-fi, gleefully gross-out adventure loosely in the vein of fellow budget-challenged romps like Feast or Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer, Infestation is written and directed by Kyle Rankin, one of the co-directors behind The Battle of Shaker Heights — the final Project Greenlight flick, which whiffed commercially but helped put Shia LaBeouf on the path toward big screen domination on which he now seems to be. It’s not a movie that reinvents the wheel (or in any way, shape or form really desires to), but it is fun, and well done, benefiting from the jocular presence of Christopher Marquette. Genre fans will assuredly dig it.

A mundane office workday takes a sudden turn for the worse when twentysomething chronic underachiever Cooper is rendered unconscious by an earsplitting noise. He wakes up several days later, in a massive cocoon spun by mutant, flesh-eating insects. Upon hooking up with Sara (Brooke Nevin), the daughter of his deceased boss, Cooper unwraps a couple more coworkers at the downtown office park around him, forming a team of strangers to eventually strike out into the great unknown, and fight off the infestation. In addition to gruff, tough-talking Sara, there’s Cindy (Kinsey Packard), plus Al (Wesley Thompson) and his deaf son, a hulking man-child named Hugo (Quincy Sloan). A plan is forged to check on a select handful of loved ones and then work toward safety; Cooper eventually crosses paths with emotionally withholding dad Ethan (Ray Wise), who can’t even sincerely compliment his son for making it across the city, and back to his house.

In movies like Fanboys and the underrated The Girl Next Door, Marquette has provided solid comic relief, but here he anchors the entire film, in winning fashion. Rankin also plays with audience expectation and genre convention in fresh, slightly amusing ways. Sometimes the manner in which he leapfrogs story hurdles is funny right through the fog of shrugs (a character, playing a massage therapy student, uses a home pregnancy test to determine the venomous nature of a captured spider), but a couple times Rankin requires characters to nakedly intuit things that don’t entirely make sense. Efram Potelle, Rankin’s Shaker Heights co-director, scores a visual effects supervisor credit here (a big part of the duo’s short film work, for those who remember), and it’s undeniably true that Infestation‘s giant bugs — a smart, seamless mixture of practical and CGI effects — go a long way toward making one believe enough in the conceit of the film to lie back and just have a good time.

Infestation arrives on DVD presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound and 2.0 stereo audio tracks, as well as optional English and Spanish subtitles. Apart from trailers for other releases, the only supplemental extra is a feature-length audio commentary track from Rankin that is fairly low-key, to the point it could be legitimately described as enervated. Rankin talks some about Wise’s penchant for improvisation, and cops to the fact that the movie’s abortive ending is a naked ploy to set up a potential sequel. In fact, he says, he has a two-film arc sketched out, if Infestation catches on as a viral DVD smash. Hey… far worse things could happen. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) C (Disc)