Quarantine this film...

Movie: Quarantine
Director: John Erick Dowdle
Starring: Jennifer Carpenter, Columbus Short, Marin Hinkle
Rating: 4/10

Rookie reporter Angela Vidal (Jennifer Carpenter) and her cameraman Scott (Steve Harris) work for a reality TV show about people that work whilst the rest of the world is asleep. As a result they are assigned to cover the night shift at an LA fire station. Nothing happens for most of the night apart from flirting and establishing the characters of Vidal and her cameraman, as well as the two firemen they’ve been assigned to (ten bucks says you can guess who dies first).

Then suddenly they get a call in the middle of the night and rush to a small apartment block where they meet up with two cops. Once inside, they find a woman covered in blood and breathing heavily. She then attacks them... with her teeth. As the cast try to get help for the injured policeman, they realise that the building is sealed and they have no way of escaping.

If the premise sounds familiar, it is because “Quarantine” is a remake of a Spanish film that was released just last year, but they're zombies in Spain and not infected with some weird mutation of rabies.

The entire film is shot with the one camera to give it a more realistic feeling (much like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield). Like the two previous films, the camera work is shaky and, as the horror mounts, finds it harder to focus. This is a technique that does work; though if you have a squeamish disposition or get motion sickness and have an aversion to gore, don’t see the film.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what the ending will be, and as such the character development is perfunctory at best. We know Vidal and her plucky cameraman will survive to the very end, and as the rest of the cast is dispatched we find them alone but for one of the firemen, Jake (Jay Hernandez), as they try to make it out alive.

Needless to say they fail.

Which is what you could say about the film. It is supposed to be a horror film, and although there are tense moments, there was nothing more substantial to it. The cast is as solid as a horror movie can be (all Carpenter needed to do was look pretty, look flirty, look scared, scream, look pretty, look scared and so on), but otherwise it falls into the category of ‘been there, done that’.