Butler's Cinema Scene

Jazmin Stuart and Daniel Hendler in “Phase 7”

“PHASE 7” My rating: C 

98 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Urbanites imprisoned in their own apartments are nothing new (see “Quarantine” and plenty of zombie movies), but the low-budget Argentine effort “Phase 7” tries to spice the genre up with droll humor.

Actually, “spice” is the wrong word to use here, since Nicolas Goldbart’s film is so laid back and casual that you can practically see it evaporating off the screen.

Coco (Daniel Hendler) and his wife Pipi (Jazmin Stuart) are city dwellers expecting their first baby. We encounter them in a supermarket where they seem not to notice that other shoppers are running around madly and grabbing items off the shelves as if the end of the world had just been announced.

Which, in a way, is exactly what’s happened. Some sort of plague is sweeping the city, though Coco and Pipi are so wrapped up in their impending parenthood that they’re the last to get the news.  Soon they can’t avoid the unpleasantness. Government types in hazmat suits drape a huge plastic tarp over their apartment building and tell everyone to hunker down until the crisis passes.

“Phase 7” is fueled by two narrative currents.

In the building’s hallways the doofus-y Coco discovers that some residents have gone feral, breaking into apartments, killing the occupants and seizing their food and medicine.

One old fellow (the venerable Federico Luppi) reinvents himself as a geriatric Charles Bronson, marching around with a shotgun.

Then there’s Coco’s neighbor Horacio (Jose “Yayo” Guridi), a closet survivalist who has a treasure trove of arms and ammo and who lends Coco a survival suit so that the two can patrol the building without fear of infection.

The joke here is that while Horacio knows his way around a weapon, Coco is more of a threat to himself than to anyone else.

When he’s not out doing recon on the neighbors, Coco must deal with the hormonally-strapped Pipi, who views the whole pandemic thing as a crock. She’s damned if some epidemic is going to deprive her of the perks every pregnant lady deserves.

There a bit of action and gore here, but mostly “Phase 7” — part of AMC’s Bloody Disgusting series — is played for low-keyed laughs. A bit too low-keyed, as it turns out.

| Robert W. Butler