Jennifer Carpenter, who’s best known these days as Deb, a serial killer’s
sister on Showtime’s Dexter, stars here as Angela Vidal, a local TV new reporter who has been sent with her cameraman Scott to ride along with a unit of the Los Angeles Fire Department as they respond to calls. At first, Angela’s complaining about how slow things are--until the fire station she’s been assigned to finally gets a call. The emergency call they respond to is at an apartment building, where an old woman’s blood-curdling screams have alarmed her neighbors. When the firefighters--who are trained as paramedics--encounter the sick woman, it’s become very clear that there is something very wrong with her; especially when she attacks a cop and bites him in the neck. And it’s all caught on camera!
Quarantine is yet another movie that’s told through the shaky subjective single
camera POV--this time, through the lenses of Scott, who’s a professional
cameraman, at least. What this means is that the camera isn’t too herky-jerky
all the time, at least not until it starts hitting the fan. But ten years after
The Blair Witch Project, and well over a year after
Cloverfield, this "shaky-cam" storytelling style
is getting very old, and it’s being used so often these days that it’s making
me miss the traditional method of moviemaking. Quarantine, which is a remake
of a Spanish film called [rec], is basically a
zombie movie with a dash of Lovecraft tossed in for good measure. As in
28 Days Later, the zombies aren’t undead, but living people infected with a mutant virus.
Carpenter is very good at playing the charming, perky reporter who doesn't get
on your nerves--but unfortunately, she soon fades into the background as a
jumble of cardboard characters emerge to fight for our attention. In the well-done
commentary, the filmmakers pat themselves on the back for creating a
Psycho-type plot twist (where one character who is set up to be the hero gets
cut down early on) yet they never really bother to establish an on-screen
replacement (and no, the filmmakers telling you who the replacement is in the
commentary doesn’t count--the film should stand on its own merits), and this
fact--mixed with the running and jumping and screaming that follows, makes for
some pretty confusing moments in the film that often boarder on parody.
And speaking of parody, another problem is that the horrific elements are sometimes so over the top,
that they wind up being unintentionally funny. A case in point is the scene
where the cameraman kills one of the zombies with his camera--which gives the
viewer a hysterically bizarre sensation of having their face rammed right into
the zombie’s head. While the film may not be perfect, the DVD has a great
special feature in that the filmmaker’s commentary is subtitled, thus making
their comments accessible for the profoundly deaf. Very nice touch! Quarantine
isn’t a terrible film, not by any means. Both cast and crew are to be commended
for their efforts. But I'm getting tired of yet another
cinematic trend--the shaky cam POV--that’s been run into the ground by Hollywood.
--SF
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