We open on a farm in rural Ireland, bleak and isolated as the title suggests. Dan, the owner of the farm, has been paid by a geneticist named John to allow him to do some genetic engineering experiments with his cows. Orla, the local vet, arrives to check up on the latest cow that is nearly ready to deliver her calf. As Orla reaches inside to check the position of the calf, it bites her hand, drawing blood. She calls John in, and they perform an ultrasound, revealing a normal calf. What neither of them notices is a small circle, moving within the calf.

Later that day, Mary and Jamie pull their caravan off the road near Dan’s farm. He warns them off the property, giving them one night to stay. From their conversation, the two are running from the authorities, but we never find out why. In about twenty minutes, it will be irrelevant.

That night, the cow goes into labor, but Dan can’t get the calf out. He runs to the only people for miles, Jamie and Mary, for help. With Jamie’s aid, he pulls the calf out of the cow using a very primitive and painful looking rope contraption, but it’s not breathing. After swinging it around his head to clear its lungs, he reaches into its mouth to remove any extraneous matter blocking its throat…and it bites the end of one of his fingers off with inch-long fangs. Things just get creepier and more tense from here.

Orla arrives to check on Dan and the calf, and she deems it necessary to put the calf down. Using a fixed-projectile spike gun that trepans the target with tremendous force, Orla moves to put the calf down, but it wiggles and she succeeds only in blowing the top of its skull off. It starts shrieking, and Dan has to hold it in place. The spike gun jams, and as Orla races to fix it, the mother cow panics and charges the pen they’re in. The gun repaired, Orla has to first put down the mother before she kills them both, and then the screaming calf.

Performing an autopsy on the calf, Orla discovers six embryonic sacs inside it, each containing a hideously deformed fetus with no legs and a segmented exoskeleton. Dan understandably freaks the fuck out, and Orla explains to him that Dr. John (first one of you to make a voodoo joke gets cock slapped) was trying to create a strain of cow with a sped-up lifecycle that would be fertile earlier in life. Turns out he sped up the process a bit too much, and the result was monsters. Really, when isn’t the result monsters?

They make the mistake of leaving the corpse on the table when Dan goes to welcome Jamie and Mary to stay on his property, and Orla to contact John about the deformities. One of the fetuses isn’t quite dead, and it wriggles off the table to grow unseen in the barns and manure pits of the farm.

What follows is probably the single best Alien knockoff I’ve ever seen. The creature grows to five or six feet long, and begins hiding inside the bodies of the remaining cows as it prepares to breed. John studies its cells and finds that it’s growing at a tremendous rate of speed. If they don’t find it and kill it before it uses up all the food on the farm and escapes, it could breed thousands or even millions more like it in a matter of months. And it can cross the species barrier to infect humans.

This is the second movie I’ve seen released by a fairly new company called First Look Entertainment. The first was a nifty little DV indie feature called Salvage, and as much as I hate tiny-budget stuff shot on Digital Video because that medium still hasn’t evolved past the look-what-I-shot-with-my-camcorder-in-my-mom’s-basement phase, that one was pretty goddamn cool. So First Look is two for two.

Isolation is a bigger production, with slick-looking cinematography that really makes the bleakness of rural Ireland stand out. As much as I find that particular part of the world beautiful, it can be pretty stark and unwelcoming seen in the right light. The washed-out look also wipes away any thoughts of warm-and-fuzzy Norman Rockwell-style farm life. Dan’s cattle farm is filthy and dingy, and is just barely enough to get him by. When they have to start killing all his cows to find the creature, you can feel the way he’s seeing his entire life drop to the ground in a puddle of blood, one body at a time.

But of course, the real star of the show is Bob “Dog Soldiers” Keen’s mutant cow worm. I realize that sounds kind of silly, just seeing those three words strung together, but this fucking thing freaked me the hell out. Although it had me straining for a better look at the thing because you see so little of it and it moves so fast, director Billy O’Brien followed Ridley Scott’s footsteps into the less-is-more camp. Letting the viewer’s imagination fill in the slimy details worked fantastically to the movie’s advantage.

Some people are scared of ghosts, some people are scared of serial killers. The thing that gets under my skin and has me checking under the bed before I go to sleep is slimy, deformed fetus monsters - genetic aberrations that make a horrible mockery of some mundane creature (has to be mammalian, though – bugs and fish and reptiles are already hideous, and therefore can’t be made unsettling by the addition of a few limbs or eyes).

The cast and crew clearly took the subject matter dead seriously. What could have been funny, whether accidentally or intentionally (as with the upcoming Black Sheep from New Zealand), is handled in a tense, dark manner that has you believing for every single frame of the movie that these people really are fighting for their lives against a mutant cow. And, as I said before, it’s fucking scary. It takes a lot for one of these movies to really wig me out, and even sitting next to Malorie on the bed and talking about the movie as it was playing, I found myself glancing nervously to the foot of the bed and to the window next to me, expecting that glistening, fanged cow face to come flying out at me and rip my throat out and flop around in my blood. Bugh.

The only downside is that the movie telegraphs it’s ending at about the halfway point. I could think of several cooler ways to handle the ending, but they’re all more shock effect and monsters, and I suspect that a big, flashy ending would undercut the movie’s serious tone. The subtler, Dunwich Horror-style ending was probably the way to go. As I’ve said before, I don’t expect a movie to reinvent the wheel, as long as I’m given a really goddamn good wheel to roll around with. This, gentle reader, is such a wheel. Check it out with the quickness.