Quarantine

You know those haunted house attractions you always find around Halloween? The ones were you walk down dark hallways, only to have people with fake blood and gore dripping from their faces jump out at you from the shadows, or come running at you out of the darkness screaming like a banshee? Take a camcorder along with you the next time you go to one of those, and film everything you see. The film that you shoot probably won't be too different from Quarantine, and best of all, you won't have to pay to watch it.

The movie is actually a remake of a Spanish horror film called REC., which according to the IMDB, came out just about a year ago in November 2007. My guess is that the people at Screen Gems studio saw the opening weekend grosses for Cloverfield back in January, and sped this US version into production. Like Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project before it, Quarantine is shot entirely through the lens of a handheld camera. It works a little bit better here than in some of the past films, since I didn't feel sick to my stomach at times watching the camera bounce and shake around. The camerawork here is fairly steady, at least until the last half, when the entire thing collapses into chaos and it becomes hard to tell what's going on and who is currently running at the camera and screaming at the cameraman and us. For the most part, the movie is competently made, despite its obvious low budget, and the sometimes questionable talent of certain cast members. It's actually effective and effectively creepy for its first 40 minutes or so. Then the movie keeps on doing the same thing over and over again, and we start to realize that the movie's already shown us everything it's going to show us, and we still have about an hour left to go.

The set up centers on a TV journalist named Angela Vidal (Jennifer Carpenter), who is doing an in-depth report on the lives of L.A. fire fighters for a TV program called "Night Shift". Along with her mostly off screen cameraman Scott (Steve Harris), she tours the firehouse and is introduced to certain members, such as Jake (Jay Hernandez) and Fletcher (Johnathon Schaech), who give her a personal tour of the building and walks her through a typical night at the station. An emergency call eventually comes in late that night, and Angela gets to follow the men to a job set at an apartment complex. They've received a 911 call from the building about one of the residents, Ms. Espinoza (Jeannie Epper), having health problems. When the firemen break down the apartment door, they find her extremely disoriented and making strange croaking sounds. She then proceeds to attack one of the men, biting him ferociously like an animal. As the firemen, police officers, and camera crew try to figure out what to do, they quickly discover that all exits of the building are starting to be sealed off by government officials who are surrounding the building and refusing to let anyone leave. A strange disease is starting to spread throughout the building, and as the number of infected begins to increase, all Angela and the few sane survivors can do is pray to find a way out.

Quarantine builds up a lot of promise during its first hour or so. The early scenes at the firehouse do a good job of building the characters and their relationships, and when they initially enter the apartment building, the movie builds a certain amount of dread. Though I was never actually scared, I did find my eyes darting about the screen, trying to find anyone who might be hiding in the shadows. We're interested, and as the first early bits of information about what's going on begins to filter in, I found myself intrigued. It's right about this point that the movie runs out of things to do or say, and basically devotes most of its time to the "infected" actors running at the camera from out of the shadows, screaming. It gets to the point that we expect it, so we're no longer interested or frightened. The repetitive nature of the movie begins to show itself, and never quite makes an exit. Worse still, the camera work becomes increasingly hard to follow, almost to the point that I couldn't tell which character was currently infected and attacking the camera at that moment.

The "documentary" approach of the film is supposed to put us right there in the action and probably make us feel closer to the characters, but oddly enough, it made me feel more distant. The movie never quite lets us get very close to these people to begin with, so they quickly turn into faceless victims and monsters. There's a scene about midway through where Angela interviews one of the tenants of the building, leading me to think the script would start taking a human approach, but it never bothers to do so again, nor are the tenants developed beyond any basic initial feature. (One's a drunk, one can't speak English, one's a mother with a sick little girl, etc.) I could clearly see that things were starting to go downhill, but even that couldn't prepare me for the climax, where things pretty much bottom out with a somewhat confusing and underdeveloped discovery that's supposed to provide some answers, but only left me with more questions. The worst part of it all? The film's poster and ad campaign literally gives away the final shot of the film. I'd love to know what Screen Gems was thinking there.
Quarantine just never manages to build to anything beyond its initial promise and central gimmick. There's one or two effective jump scares, but given the number of times it tries to make us jump in its roughly 90 minute running time, that's nowhere near enough. The characters eventually get lost in the chaos of the movie, so we're left to just sit there and try to make sense out of the chaos. Too bad we never get enough to do so. While I don't think Quarantine is quite bad enough that the studio had to hide it from critics this weekend, this is still a highly disappointing movie that makes me hope this handheld camera horror craze will be over soon enough.

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