Rating of
2.5/4
Get Down with This Sickness
Chris Kavan - wrote on 10/23/08
This is a horror film that succeeds in all the right places, but doesn't manage to avoid the pit-traps of the genre. What starts off as a puff-piece news story about the night-shift at a local fire station turns into a ghastly ordeal of survival.
First off, the hand-held camera worked for me. Sure, you can call it a gimmick or a fad, but Quarantine manages to make some fresh headway (death by camera, anyone?) into the hand-held genre. Quarantine also succeeds by both handling the "gotcha" jump-out scares, and by keeping an overall feeling of dread and hopelessness throughout. Plus, the whole biological terror idea is one that seems plausible, more like 28 Days Later than just random zombies popping up and ruining your day.
It also doesn't go too overboard on the gore. There's plenty of blood, but it manages to frame it around a pretty good story. There's not too much elaboration, but enough effort is put into the plot to make it a step above most horror films.
Where Quarantine fails can be said of many horror films: not enough character development. The beginning of the film makes you empathize with the cute reporter, selfless firefighter and no-nonsense camera man. However, by the time the crisis hits, we have a cast of about a dozen people, most of whom are caricatures. You have the ANGRY COP, the SURLY DRUNK and the PROTECTIVE MOTHER along with a building super, a non-English-speaking couple and a few others. With the scant background, it's hard to care when the flesh-rending begins.
My other big gripe is the ending feels both rushed and abrupt. The last ten minutes try to explain everything (halfway successful) and then ends suddenly. I was expecting a coda - a follow-up report or even a text ending explaining what happened after the events, but it leaves you nothing. Leaving things up to the imagination can be good, but in this case a little something would have been nice.
Overall, this is a good horror film. It didn't shock me out of my seat, but it kept me interested and had enough scares to make it worthwhile.
