Monday, May 4, 2009

Quarantine (R-2008)

"Quarantine" is one of the "hand-held single camera" movies in the tradition of "The Blair Witch Project" and "Cloverfield". The premise is sort of the same: A building in Los Angeles was sealed off by the government and none of the residents have ever resurfaced. What you are watching is essentially footage discovered from a news camera which details "what happened" in that building that day. Then, what you have is pretty much a zombie movie. Angela Hernandez (Jennifer Carpenter, best known as "Dexter"'s sister) is a news feature reporter who does stories about the night in the city. Her current assignment is to spend a night with a Los Angeles Fire Department crew and record a night in the life with them. When they get a call, she and her cameraman climb aboard and get to see the men in action. They find themselves in a building helping police open a door that a tenant they want to talk to will not open. What they find inside leads to the building being completely sealed off with them inside while the federal government and the Center for Disease Control tries to determine what to do next. The movie is shot entirely from the point of view of the reporter and her cameraman through footage recovered from the camera. If you don't like these POV "shaky cam" films, this one won't change your mind, but I liked both movies mentioned earlier, so that was not a problem for me. There is really nothing new here story-wise as you have the "infected" (aka zombies) running loose in an apartment building. It does a nice job early on building the tension and then keeps it going with some scary attack scenes and a sense of helplessness as the tenants are completely cut off from the outside world. I liked it and found it to be fun and scary. My wife, however, was not a fan, so this kind of movie is not for everybody.

Grade: C+


Trailer:

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