All dressed up with no place to go.
Image Courtest of IMPAwards.com
Director: John Erick Dowdle
Notable Cast: Jennifer Carpenter, Steve Harris, Jay Hernandez
When can you tell a horror movie is effective? When you are panicky walking into your dark house and wish the light switch was closer to the front door. After seeing Quarantine, many viewers will likely hope they never have to step into a dark room again. It is the kind of movie that sits in the pit of your stomach and makes your hands shaky long after watching.
It would be easy to write off Quarantine as a sort of Blair Witch Project with zombies (which it is) but Quarantine is effectively its own movie. And a damn scary one at that. While it is not the first horror flick to give the audience a first person account through the use of digital film, it deserves credit for upping the gore factor considerably. Judging from some of the shots in Quarantine it looks as though special effects in digital movies are still hard to master.
While some of the rough-looking effects take away from the movie’s realism, they do nothing to ruin the intensely scary atmosphere. It is difficult to imagine anything more terrifying than a slow, agonizing, evitable death; and once zombies are added to the equation there isn’t a moment of solace to be had. Even Quarantine‘s character establishing opening feels tense.
As the host of a late night TV show called “Night Shift”, Angela Vidal (Jennifer Carpenter) is interviewing a Los Angeles fire department when they are called to a seemingly routine emergency. While Angela almost too anxiously anticipates the certain emergency call, she is informed that 80 percent of calls are medical emergencies.
Soon after the men arrive things go horribly awry. One of the tenants of a small apartment has been infected with what seems to be rabies. The carnage begins when the men try to help her and two are fatally injured. As Quarantine kicks it into high gear, it would be perfectly fine if it were merely a run of the mill zombie movie with all the usual tricks (which it is). But the filmmakers felt that tiny glimmer of hope in the zombie genre was a bit too much.
In a twist that all but guarantees that the survival rate will be zero, Quarantine makes good on its title. Everyone is locked inside the building as the ratio of healthy to infected people quickly tips in favor of the infected. Angela and company’s futile attempts to survive seem all the more pointless as there seems to be no feasible alternative to accepting the fact that they are all going to die one way or another.
The rest of the film is literally a blur as the cameraman (Steve Harris) frantically documents whatever he can in the hopes of making some sense of what is happening. Certain plot points are revealed as if figuring out why it is all happening will help the survivors in somehow escaping with their lives.
It is this bleak hopelessness that makes Quarantine the nausea inducing horror movie that so many wish they could be. The less chance of survival, the scarier the movie. So logic would suggest that if there is no chance of survival in Quarantine then that would make it one of the scariest movies ever (which it is).
FINAL RATING (ON A SCALE OF 1-5 BUCKETS):
