John Erick
Dowdle's coldly calculating Quarantine plugs
simultaneously into three of the hottest trends sweeping horror movies since
masked, seemingly indestructible madmen began disemboweling horny,
beer-drinking teenagers. Like The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield,
Diary Of The Dead, and Behind The Mask: The Rise Of Leslie
Vernon, it's a cinéma vérité horror film
compiled from ostensibly real footage shot by one of its characters. Like just
about every horror film since The Ring, it's also a remake of a recent foreign fright flick, in this case the
2007 Spanish chiller [Rec]. Finally,
it's the latest in a lurching, erratic line of horror movies about zombies, or
at least zombie-like ghouls. Quarantine isn't original, but at least it offers a relatively novel synthesis of
ubiquitous trends.
Jennifer
Carpenter stars as a plucky television reporter who spends a night covering the
everyday heroes at a local fire department. Events take an ominous turn when
the firefighters respond to a call from a spooky old apartment building that's
home to an apparently rabid old woman. The building is quickly quarantined, and
Carpenter, her cameramen, and firefighter Jay Hernandez wind up battling
obstacles from all sides: zombie-like ghouls in the building, and shadowy
government operatives on the outside trying to keep them escaping.
Quarantine gets off to an encouragingly believable start, as
Carpenter flirts and jokes her way through introductory meetings with her
testosterone-heavy subjects. The first act has an agreeably loose,
improvisational feel, but the verisimilitude weakens once the bloodshed begins.
Why do these brawny firefighters and police officers let Carpenter keep filming
them after her cute little human-interest story devolves into a brutal, bloody
quest for survival? Shouldn't the cameraman concentrate on getting out of this
nightmare alive rather than scoring sweet-ass footage? Alas, without the
constant shooting, there would be no film. Carpenter's performance similarly
devolves once she stops playing a strong, assertive character and turns into a
running, screaming, crying machine. Dowdle manages a few nice shocks and some
neat moments of pitch-black gallows humor, but Quarantine nevertheless feels awfully familiar, and it grows
less convincing with each passing moment. At its worst, it abandons realism
entirely and flirts with gory kitsch.