This year, "Cloverfield" popularized the "first-person point of view" shooting style. This technique has appeared more and more over the past few years in films to varying success. For example, George Romero's "Diary of the Dead" (2007) tried to use the technique in a zombie film, though the experiment ultimately failed. "Quarantine" (2008), directed by John Erick Dowdle, tries to take another crack at the style by remaking a popular Spanish film, "[REC]" (2007), adopting the exact same plot and visual style.
The film stars Jennifer Carpenter (Deb in Showtime's "Dexter") as Angela Vidal, a reporter who is covering the night shift at a fire department for a special interest piece. She and her cameraman Scott Percival (played by Steve Harris) follow firefighters Jake and Fletcher (Jay Hernandez and Johnathon Schaech) as they go about their usual business through the night. When the fire department gets a call, Vidal and Percival follow their crew and the two firefighters to a building where a woman has been screaming incessantly.
The landlord of the building leads the pair to the woman, who then brutally attacks the group and injures one police officer. As the group tries to leave the building to get medical attention for the police officer, they find that they have been locked in. The U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) has taken control of the building and deemed it "quarantined:" No residents may enter or leave the building, and anyone who tries to escape will be terminated. From here, the audience discovers that the people in the building are being infected with a mutant form of rabies which makes them aggressive and homicidal.
It should be noted that the "monsters" in this movie are not zombies in the slightest; even though the rabies takes over the brain and nervous system, the people who are infected are very much alive. The scary part is that rabies actually can affect humans in real life, and it can lead to some similar effects after a greater period of incubation and infection.
The film does its best to maintain realism, but there are some blatant slips. For example, after the CDC cuts power to the building, characters are still able to use an elevator. This is just one example of the many plot points that make no sense.
The film provides quite a few "jump scares" that are prevalent in most horror movies; these come at various, well-timed points that truly freak out audience members. The amount of gore and blood is minimal, though still present in the film.
The plot is generally thrilling, though most of the time a viewer will have an easy time figuring out where the story is going and what might happen next. Anyone who gets motion sickness should avoid this film; many people left the theater because they were about to get sick. The camera jumps in and out of focus, darts all over the place when it is used as a flashlight, and sporadically turns on and off when it is involved in a rough action scene.
Unfortunately, most of the film's twists, including the ending, are given away in the trailer. It is a shame that film companies are taking so much mystery away from their films in favor of profits by showing too much in the trailer. Another disappointing facet of the movie is its lack of closure. The ending doesn't provide any answers, while the trailer gives us an additional scene that should have been included in the movie.
The bottom line: People who get a kick out of cheap thrills and not-so-good horror movies should grab a bucket of popcorn and enjoy the flick. Everyone else, on the other hand, would probably have a better time staying quarantined in the safety of your dorm.
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Starring Jennifer Carpenter, Steve Harris, Jay Hernandez
Directed by John Erick Dowdle
