Quarantine (2008)

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Angela Vidal	Jennifer Carpenter
Scott Perical	Steve Harris	½
Jake	Jay Hernandez	½
George Fletcher	Johnathon Scaetch	½
Yun Ivanov	Rade Serbedzija

Review

It worked for some with The Blair Witch Project, because it was new and refreshing, and didn't last forever. It worked for half a film with Cloverfield, because it was well-acted and characterologically interesting. It works only on a very simple level with the predictable shocker Quarantine, because there isn't enough substance, creativity or filmatic value at display.

The 'it' naturally refers to hand-held, first-person, pseudo-real horror. This time we follow a feature journalism team of a cameraman (Harris) and a reporter (Carpenter) who joins two L.A. fire-fighters into an apartment building where a mysterious virus is about to run riot. The semi-effective early visual shocks and the interesting quarantine angle is gradually devoured by the conventional last-man-standing narrative structure, in which the characters choices and motivation time and time again defies logic in order to keep up with the plot recipe. Add to that a new level of nauseating and epileptic camera-movement, and you have a film whose final twenty minutes seems to last for hours. Someone should have told John Erick Dowdle to just end it already, because after a certain point, no one gives a rats ass (no pun intended) about whether these deafening characters live or die.