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Quarantine (2008)
 
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Directed
by:
John Erick
Dowdle |
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COUNTRY
USA |
GENRE
Horror/Thriller |
NORWEGIAN
TITLE
Quarantine |
RUNNING
TIME
89 minutes |
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Produced
by:
Sergio Agüero
Clint Culpepper
Doug Davison
Carlos Fernández
Julio Fernández
Roy Lee |
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Written by:
John Erick
Dowdle
Drew Dowdle |
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 psychologically interesting. It works
only on a very simple level with the predictable shocker Quarantine,
because there isn't enough substance, creativity or cinematic value on display.
The 'it' above naturally refers to handheld, first-person, pseudo-real
horror of the found-footage category. This time we follow a TV
journalism team of a cameraman (Steve Harris) and a reporter (Jennifer
Carpenter) who join two LA fire-fighters in an apartment building where
a mysterious virus is about to run riot. The semi-effective early visual
shocks and the interesting quarantine angle are gradually devoured by
the conventional last-man-standing narrative structure, in which the
characters' choices and motivations time and time again defy 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 seem 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 rat's ass (pun intended) about whether these deafening
characters live or die.
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