Rot taught me something. I never, ever want to be a graduate student. Seriously, this movie makes it seem like the kind of living hell that I'd rail against.

Madison (Kris Alexandrea) is one of those under pressue grad students, so part of the life of academics that the one thing she can leave behind is her boyfriend Jesse (Johnny Kostrey). But once he goes missing, someone or something else has taken his body over. And being busy with the demands of a doctorate will be easy compared to this.

Writer/director/editor Andrew Merrill has put together a story that could be a possession film or something akin to a body snatcher movie, but it never really explains much about the evil force that is inside Jesse. What's more important is how his rage explodes and how it impacts everyone in his life.

The how is quite simple: Jesse is injured by an attack by one of the patients in the nursing home where he works. At first, he seems fine, but before long, he assaults both his roommate Aaron (Johnny Uhorchuk) and girlfriend Nora (Sara Young Chandler) and then disappears.

The virus, if you will, has begun to spread all over town, with the very center of it being the nursing home. Wth a title like Rot, you can rest assured that things will get messy.

It's a shame such fantastic cover art was used on such a piss poor film. I'm convinced that all the good reviews about this film are throw away accounts of the director.

Don't bother watching - the acting is stiff, the dialogue is as hollow as holy hell, and plot is boring enough to make traffic seem fun. The climax is pretty funny although I don't think the intent was humor.

Crumby LA faux-horror that is a stinky smear on the resume of every person involved.

When I sat down to watch "Rot", I must admit that I had expected quite something else than what this movie turned out to be. And for a horror movie, I must say that "Rot" was a swing and a miss.

I am not really sure what writer and director Andrew Merrill tried to accomplish with the script and storyline for this movie, because it felt more like a collection of randomly shot sequences that were put into a pseudo-chronological fashion in order to make a movie. I can't claim to have been entertained by what the script turned out to be. In fact, I found it to be a random scrambled mess that lacked proper coherency.

The characters in the movie sort of faded into one another for me. I couldn't really differentiate between the characters, as they were lacking motivation, background, personality and traits. It just felt like I was watching a puppet show of people milling about randomly.

When I read the synopsis, I must admit that it sounded like this movie had the ingredients of being a movie that could be set in the early stages of a zombie outbreak. But turns out that it was nothing of the kind. In fact, I have honestly no clue what "Rot" turned out to be; aside from being a boring movie.

As for the acting performances in "Rot". Well, don't go expecting to be blown away by any up and coming grand performers here. This is by no means award-winning material. And I think that the actors and actresses were definitely hindered in performing properly given the fact that the script was just downright bad, and the characters were flaccid and lacking details.

I managed to sit through the entire ordeal up to the end, hoping that the movie would become better along the way. But it just never did that, and I was left unimpressed and unentertained. I am rating "Rot" a generous two out of ten stars, mostly because the production level of the movie was actually adequate.