Reviewed by Geno McGahee
I loved THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and I sort of liked CLOVERFIELD, but this “reality” style of horror filmmaking has gotten old, especially when it isn’t done well at all. QUARANTINE takes the reality movie style and mixes in some of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and puts it together into 89 minutes of entire crap. I was really looking forward to this movie and I have to give the makers credit. They did do a great job on the movie trailer…so we know that if they made a ninety second movie, they’d do very well, but this ninety minute movie was about as bad as it can possibly get. I am so happy that I rented this and didn’t buy it, which I was considering.
We begin with Angela (Jennifer Carpenter), a reporter doing a piece on firemen. She is outside the station and then goes inside and for what seems like ten hours, she shows us the place, plays basketball, slides down the pole a few times, and flirts with the boys. This goes on forever…it is complete filler to make it ninety minutes and if you are going to puke in your shoes, the first twenty minutes will get you there.
Now, I didn’t mind the method of filming in CLOVERFIELD…because you were brought right into the action right away, overcoming the horrible dialogue in the first five minutes of the film, but this film is nearly impossible to get through, and I commend each and every horror fan that makes it beyond the 20 minute mark. If you like firemen, you might actually like this film. If you like firemen with mustaches, this might turn out to be your favorite film of all time!
The firemen finally get an emergency call and they are off with Angela in tow. They are reporting to a building where a woman has gone mad and needs some medical attention. Now if you know what the title of the movie is, you know what is going to happen to the group once they go inside of the building. When they reach the woman, she is a zombie, spewing some green shit out of her mouth and hissing. While trying to help her, a cop gets bitten on the neck as all zombies tend to do, and now we really have a problem.
The cops and hazmat teams surround the building and block all exits, panicking everyone inside, but you don’t care because none of the characters matter. There is zero character development here, and most of the characters are very annoying and do things that nobody would ever do. For instance, they KNOW that anyone bit by a zombie becomes a zombie, yet Angela tries desperately to take the handcuffs off of a woman that got bit, which would release her on the people. Then the bio guys come in and turn their back on a zombie and of course, they get bit, but these little foolish things could have been overlooked had this movie had absolutely anything going for it.
Now, QUARANTINE borrows heavily from movies like CLOVERFIELD and takes a lot from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, and now they have added the ridiculous fast motion scenes that many horror films have. Zombies run in double speed…is that supposed to be scary? It’s ridiculous. This film just takes things from a lot of other films and compiles them into this steaming load. I cannot emphasize just how disappointing this movie was. It fails at every turn.
So if you like THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, CLOVERFIELD, and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, you’ll hate this piece of shit. And even if you don’t like them, you will hate it. It does nothing right and the zombies won’t scare a ten year old…even with them running at double speed. Avoid this one people. Just watch the trailer for the movie. That is pretty good.
Scared Stiff Rating: 3/10. Quarantine the people from seeing this movie.