Quarantine

Quarantine (2008)

[Not Really]
Moderately Trashy

Remake of the Spanish flick [Rec] which my friend saw a little while back and told me was really fucked up and scary and which I really want to see (despite the fact that she and I don't really share taste in movies most of the time).

First person horror about a bunch of people who get quarantined inside of their apartment building with a bunch of zombies. Oh, sorry, they're not really zombies, they're just infected with some sort of crazy whack ass strain of rabies (invented by Satanists? Did I get that right?), a la 28 Days Later... only it makes even less sense if such a thing is possible.

They didn't really do anything that innovative with the first-person-horror genre, following the conventions established by other films in the genre (such as how everybody has to get killed (maybe). As usual, we never see any rock solid proof of the characters death or survival but it's safe to assume they died).

Unlike, say, The Blair Witch Project, this movie didn't really create characters which I actually cared about, despite a long boring opening sequence which was supposed to help build emotional attachment I guess. Mr. Blue was saying today that it would have been more interesting had the story been told from the point of view of one of the tenants of the apartment, who would be much more emotionally invested in the other residents, making the movie much more disturbing.

Structurally, the movie is the same as Cloverfield (the characters are trapped inside of a small space with something weird and spend the entire movie trying to find a way to get out into the normal world), although in that movie they managed to make up a monster that was weird and bizarre enough to freak me out. The last twenty minutes of this movie were sort of creepy and interesting, but that was after having to sit through Jennifer Carpenter's annoying screaming for about an hour.

Part of this is that I'm just getting tired of zombie movies. Throughout the movie I was basically sitting there thinking, 'jesus, don't freak out! Just shoot em in the head, you'll be fine', and contemplating the various breaches of logic.

Despite all that, I will say this movie was about five hundred times better than Diary of the Dead.

END

Directed by: John Erick Dowdle. Written by: John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle based on the film [Rec] written by Jaume Balagueró, Luis Berdejo and Paco Plaza. Starring: Jennifer Carpenter, Jay Hernandez, Steve Harris, Johnathon Schaech, Columbus Short, Rade Serbedzija, Greg Germann, Andrew Fiscella.